Including the Customer in the Customer Assurance Process

From time immemorial businesses have coined this term, “Customer Complaints”, to register what went wrong with the product or service. Customer Complaint Handling process typically tries to do statistical analyses and corrective actions. The customer is excluded from this process, traditionally.

These processes are by nature not preventive in their scope, but corrective.

It is almost like the Quality Inspection of the earlier times, which is now replaced by Quality Assurance, which is more preventive than corrective.  

From Sales representatives to the entire chain of people who touch the lives of the customer, the ownership is actually ingrained and riveted in the making of the product or service.

No one can and should point finger that the product did not satisfy the customer because something in the process went wrong that was not expected.

Every complaint that the customer raises is not a surprise but an acknowledgement of the deficiencies in the process that is nowhere close to 3 sigma levels.

When you change the nomenclature of the process to be “Customer Assurance” instead of “Customer Complaint Handling”, you are taking responsibility of this inherent deficiency and trying to do something about it.

It is a positive step to make amends rather than to report a finding just merely to pass on the responsibility of the inherent failure to some unknown entity. The unknown entity is actually the most known one.

It is you, who is passing on the baton to somebody else. But it needs to change. Some game changing developments have been to include the customer in this process of assurance as well. This means the customer is also participating to see that the process does not fail. More importantly, the customer will be more aware of the costs and the consequences.

To design a process that will not have any customer complaint is like designing a six sigma process, which sometimes could be enormously economical or enormously costly.

Think of the Mumbai Dubbawallas carrying lunch boxes and never missing to deliver them either on time or to a wrong person. Their system is not costly but efficient. Their success comes from the fact that each touch point in the chain is built on trust, mutual aid and fail-proof communication.

More importantly, they do not have a complaint handling process but a customer assurance process that takes responsibility of the denouement, whatever it may be. The customer is part of this and the responsibility is binding.

Imagine the costliest of the processes that deliver six sigma level of deviation.

It is the aircraft touch downs. The cost of building such a process is enormously costly. But it must be so as it involves millions of lives and capital. Here again the customer handling processes are non-existent.

They are replaced with customer assurance process that will allow zero tolerance for failure. The customer is part of this as he or she must follow instructions without any question.

A similar example could be aircraft delays and much could be derived by including the customer in the process. Currently delays have reduced with more customer engagement in the process. The customer complaints have been replaced with customer assurance.

Actually a zero tolerance band is symbolic. It is like ensuring that a failure is not an option.

Imagine a bank and its process of risk management. It must be failure proof as it could involve billions of dollars of capital and wealth that could get wiped off in the event of a failure which had not been factored in.

But still we have bank runs and bank failures and large losses written off when some trades go wrong.

This is again something to do with Customer assurance Processes not being there but customer complaint handling mechanism thriving. In some banks even that is missing.

If customer (creditor) assurance programs are run well in banks, there will be more ownership of customer’s capital, which actually is more than 92% of all capital held by banks.

May be the banks are not keen on this as all of this appears on the liability side of their balance sheet. Most of the banker’s time is spent in shaping the asset side. That is where the problem lies.

Customer assurance processes should replace the customer complaint handling processes.

It must include the customer as part of the process, not as an outsider. That is as much true for banks to succeed as any other entity.