2016: The Year of Customer Contact

After a year of being inundated with news about the Internet of Things, Big Data, and customer relationship management, we will see a sea change in customer engagement in 2016.  One of the great untold stories of 2015 was how companies handled customers and crises.  The great lesson: A personal connection with customers is more important than ever before. 

Tesla is a prime example.

We heard a lot in 2015 about fabulous systems for anticipating customer needs and responding to customer desires.  What may have been lost on many people is the power and importance of personal customer contact.

In our high-tech society we don't often need help.  Most of our devices and appliances and cars and service providers do what they are supposed to most of the time.

It can actually be frustrating for organizations that have set up elaborate support infrastructures - such as dealers, service centers and personal assistance hot lines.  There generally aren't a lot of calls coming in, which is good news.  But with so few calls coming in, the opportunities to interact with customers are few and far between.

Companies risk losing touch with their customers if those customers don't call.  As consumers of products and services, our skills at finding help - the right help - tend to atrophy.  As service and product suppliers we struggle to ensure that we are not only there when needed - but also that the customer can find us!

It's a serious problem because, as providers of products and services, chances are good that our organizations have spent thousands of dollars (millions, actually) to win customers that can be lost in the blink of an eye.  Many products such as appliances and consumer electronics have become so inexpensive, sophisticated and commoditized that they are too expensive to diagnose and repair.  We simply replace them.  And where there is choice, as in cable or wireless service, once a certain degree of frustration is reached, we just switch.

Worse yet, customers only call when they are desperate, in danger, angry or frustrated because of what has become a rarity - the need for help.  Customer care representatives are thrown into the breach at such points like shock troops defending a vulnerable stronghold.  In such circumstances, the odds are not in their favor.

Winning in this world of diminished customer care requires a layered strategy that extends from the top of an organization to the bottom.  Consistent communication throughout an organization is necessary to convince customers that the customer care professional really does care.  If the CEO is not on board and out front, the customer care team will take more heat.

Too often we put customer contact systems in place - carefully crafted systems for routing requests to the proper point of contact with the appropriate answers.  But do we measure the performance of those systems?  Do we check the customer satisfaction with the customer care system?

Frequent travelers are probably some of the most demanding users of customer care.  We need to change a flight or a reservation.  We wrangle our way through automated systems to get to the human being who can come to our rescue.

It's a good time to ask ourselves if our tools for routing customers are working.  And by working I mean are they delivering customers to the nirvana of assistance or are they working in other intended or unintended ways to frustrate the determined efforts of valuable customers to get help.  Quite often those systems seem to be designed to prevent assistance from being obtained.

Some of my best and worst moments of customer care in 2015 came in interactions with United Airlines and Marriott.  For me, United's call center personnel are the glue that is holding the organization and the customer base together.  Without some stellar on-call performances by United's customer care team I'm not sure how I would have gotten through the year and I definitely would have had trouble getting where I needed to go.

Marriott can be annoying in that you sometimes get a national reservation line when what you really want is to talk to the local property.  I don't get near the level of personal support I'd like from Marriott - but the personnel at the individual properties are generally terrific.

When it comes to appliances, I've given up.  I can see why GE is trying to get out of the business.  No one has solved the customer care challenge - the core point of failure for which is the "service estimate" which can cost as much as the repair and is not deductible.  Time to buy a new dryer!

Apple is both the best and the worst in the business at customer care.  It is the worst because it is all but impossible to get a human being on the phone.  It is the best, because of the hundreds of Apple stores where human beings are available to help solve the problems of other human beings.  This applies to the wireless carriers and their stores as well.

Which brings me to Tesla.

The automotive industry continues to struggle with recalls and investigations and multiple points of customer connection failure.  It's never a good sign when CEOs are testifying before Congressional hearings surrounded by attorneys.

Car companies fight desperate battles to win customers.  The industry talks a lot about "conquesting" - ie. converting a customer to your brand from some competitor.  Winning customers is important to auto makers because the average life span of a car is 11 years and the average car throws off a lot of opportunities for profitable service revenue.

Carl Sewell, in his well-known tome "Customers for Life: How to Turn That One-Time Buyer into a Lifetime Customer" quantifies the lifetime value of a customer as $570,000 based on the number of cars that customer will buy during a lifetime and the value of the service revenue.  For Sewell, customer care is all about being there for the customer WHEREVER that customer is and at WHATEVER time of day or night the customer care opportunity arises.

Sewell may be an extreme case, but he is an extraordinarily successful car salesman, so his methods are proven.  What Sewell understands is that the opportunities to make a positive impression on a customer are few and far between.  When those opportunities do arise it is essential to have the systems and, more importantly, the mentality to be there for the customer.

The strange thing about the automotive industry is the vast array of available customer touch points and the lack of coordination of those touch points.  Customers having a problem with their car might call the car maker's 1-800 line (but which one?).  They might call the dealer.  They might call the relevant service provider or some independent third-party like a repair shop - or maybe they just browse online or call a friend.

The average car company has multiple call centers to serve multiple customer care functions.  The average (good sized) car dealer has a personal assistance center as well.  And service providers from SiriusXM to Agero to tire makers and retailers to insurance companies and car clubs have their own hotlines.

The picture is actually worse than this because the service cycles on cars continue to grow and car makers have often made it difficult if not impossible for customers to take care of their own cars.  So there is a strange struggle afoot over the servicing of the car - less service is required and it is harder to perform.

Add to this the fact that the auto industry may, in fact, have more call center resources pointing at its products than any other industry but with fewer calls coming in than ever before and a complete lack of coordination between these various resources.  It's a recipe for customer disappointment.

Which, okay, NOW brings me to Tesla Motors.

When Tesla has had failures, recalls, problems to solve with its cars in 2015, its communications with customers were direct, nearly instantaneous and personal.  CEO Elon Musk does not testify before Congress.  Musk blogs about what is going right and what is going wrong with Tesla vehicles and what the company intends to do about it.  And then the company follows through.

Customer complaints and problems are addressed directly and immediately - with some exceptions, no doubt.  But the exceptions prove the rule.  Musk is personally engaged.  He does not communicate via press release.  He blogs.

I am hesitant to bring up a case at a competing car company, General Motors, because the case has since been resolved amicably and there was some misunderstanding.  But the failure is emblematic of many things that are wrong with the automotive industry.

If you allow your OnStar service subscription to expire and suddenly find you have a need for the service and press the blue button, an automated message will tell you your subscription is expired and ask you to hit the button again if you want to restore your service.  An elderly OnStar customer in New York did not understand the process, failed to press the button again, and proceeded to get lost having not gotten the help he needed - all because he thought the automated voice was the actual call center.

This was a system failure that might have proved fatal.

But there is one more point to make about connected car systems like OnStar.  As a car maker you may build a button into your dashboard to summon assistance, but is your call center equipped to recognize the customer and the car when the call comes in and how quickly does assistance arrive.  This is one area where OnStar has shown leadership in the past by staying on the line until assistance arrives.  In other words, it is not enough to call for help - your organization must measure its ability to meet or exceed customer expectations.

Whatever your industry, your systems, products, or services are working better than they have ever worked before.  But with advances in customer care management has come an atrophying of the process of customer contact.  The winners in 2016 will be those organizations that are able to cut through that atrophy to preserve or restore hard won customer relationships - and reinforce a personal touch.

We manage our customer contact systems to mitigate the cost of those systems.  It is time to consider maximizing our focus on personal assistance to ensure we aren't losing customers in the process.