XM Weekly Inspiration | 15082022
onome deBBie akwara
Organizational transformation leader guiding businesses through strategic shifts in customer, product, employee, and brand experience, HR and operations optimization. 4x Global Top 100 multidisciplinary thought leader.
Hello!
It is another week and another opportunity to make customers' lives easier and keep them loyal. Why do you think a customer will decide to stop buying your product/service or stop advocating for your brand after 5+ years?
According to Niche Customer Experience Group's 2021 STATE OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IN AFRICA REPORT, there are a number of reasons why customers decide to stop buying from businesses but the top 5 reasons from the research are:
While customer service ranks as the 2nd reason for customer churn, it impacts a brand's reputation.
Let's think about it from a brand perception perspective, shall we?
According to a HubSpot article (Kirsch Katrina, What Is Brand Perception, HubSpot.Com, 21st February 2022), brand perception "is the sum of a consumer's feelings, experiences, and thoughts about a product or service. It's what people believe a brand represents, rather than what a brand says it represents."
Therefore, measuring and tracking brand reputation is crucial for every business seeking to increase customer profitability. In the article mentioned above, several ways of measuring and tracking brand perception exist. One of the ways is by collecting and acting on customer data across different stages of a customer's journey. Using the customer journey for an internet service provider (ISP) as an example, the points of gathering customer data include but are not limited to:
At the end of the day, "if customers think highly of a brand, they become loyal to it" (Katrina Kirsch) but what happens when a customer who thinks highly of a brand and has patronized the brand for years chooses to end the relationship? Therein lies my case study for the week.
SWIFT Networks Case Study: How Customer Service Quality Impacts Brand Perception
A couple of weeks ago, one of my contacts shared her customer service experience with SWIFT Networks; an internet service provider (ISP) in Nigeria.
She has not only been using the service for years but in her words, her experience with SWIFT Network's after-sale service "was her gold standard" for what great customer service should be like. She thought so highly of the brand that she's both 2 packages for home and office use. She has on a number of occasions, bragged about it to other brands that fell short of her customer service experience expectations.
Over the last couple of years, she noticed a decline in product quality (i.e. poor internet connectivity on the network) and customer service quality. As a result, she sought another ISP and discontinued her subscription.
Recently, she thought to give SWIFT a second chance by resubscribing. She made a payment on the 7th of June and up until the 7th of July (full subscription cycle), she was unable to use the service howbeit she made several calls seeking after-sale assistance. She reached out several times before the due date to complain about her inability to access the internet using her paid subscription requesting a refund but she was told an engineer would be at her location to diagnose and rectify the problem. No one showed up or called her. She called back requesting an update and was told by the customer service executive that they will process her refund. As of the 19th of July when my contact shared her experience with me, she had not received the refund and every time she called to follow up, she was given the same update alongside an obviously scripted apology.
On multiple occasions, she requested to speak with a manager to escalate her dissatisfaction but every time she asked to speak with the manager, she was told the manager was unavailable.
Some things she said while giving her feedback really got me thinking deeply i.e.:
领英推荐
If we are to summarize this experience with an illustration, below is what this customer's journey would look like from a current state journey map perspective.
I am sure you can spot a lot of issues with this experience as well as opportunities that SWIFT could have leveraged to redeem this relationship. Sadly, you can also see how this experience has now negatively impacted a loyal customer's perception of SWIFT as a brand.
By failing to offer a reliable and functional product as well as a great after-sale experience, SWIFT has lost a loyal customer who was also an advocate. From the conversation that ensued, this customer in summary now sees and describes SWIFT as:
What lesson can businesses learn from this?
Your Experience Management (XM) Inspiration For The Week
A number of things come to mind when I think about what SWIFT or any business in this situation can do differently going forward. You may not be able to win this customer back but can you prevent this from happening to other loyal customers to prevent further customer churn? Absolutely!
Here are a few tips for your consideration and I hope it makes you think differently about how you design and manage customer experiences this week and beyond.
What Next?
Customer churn should be a wake-up call for any business that wants to stay in business!
Are you losing customers daily and don't have the customer experience management capabilities to find out what is broken and fix it to prevent further customer churn?
Do you need professional assistance implementing all of the above tips in your organization? We've got you covered at Niche Customer Experience Group. Let me know by sending me a DM here on Linkedin or email [email protected]
Have a good one! ??
deBBie akwara?(Pan Africanism CX Advocate)
Managing Consultant at Cuanu Consult | ISO15189, Training, Health, Management and HR Expert; & Certified Business Development Service Provider
2 年Exactly same experience I had with my ISP. I quickly ported as about 80% of my job is online.
Chief Executive Officer at KOBAHOST | Transforming Web Hosting with Innovation and Reliability
2 年Nice write up, I hope brands subscribe to Newsletters like this. In my opinion I think the problem with most brands is that as they grow bigger they become too comfortable and forget to up the game of customer service/experience
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2 年If you don't get the #CX basics incredibly right, deBBie, then you are building your business on a weak foundation and it will fail sooner or later. (And the price you CHOOSE to charge which came out on top, as well as product reliability and proximity, are still part of the decision of what services and products to offer, and that's CX too.)