“Just because I give the client a scorecard showing we are green on everything doesn’t mean they feel we’re green.” – Beth Medley Netfor
No matter how much business leaders like to believe it, consistent satisfaction doesn’t create lasting relationships. If a friend said their mechanic provided satisfactory performance, bet you’d want someone else to look after your pride and joy. For that upcoming operation, would you be satisfied with an adequate surgeon? Would you return to a fine dining establishment that was simply satisfactory?
When people see “satisfactory,” Netfor thinks “bare minimum,” “just adequate,” “meets requirements,” and most chilling, “commodity.” In school, it was a 70 or a C-minus. Eighth place at the Grade 5 track meet. It’ll get the job done, but show us an even slightly better alternative, and we’ll switch with zero regret.
Like most company founders, the early Netfor team knew customer satisfaction was critical, and the young client-focused company produced great numbers. All analytical thinkers, the founders couldn’t reconcile such high satisfaction numbers with the client turnover they saw. Why would a satisfied client switch to a competitor? There’s no logic there.
So they hired someone to figure out why. Their advice was: Your job isn’t to tell clients what they want and can expect from you. If you want to turn satisfied customers into loyal lifelong friends, make them happy. And only they can tell you how to do that. You need to reach out to them instead of waiting for the other way around. What do they really want to see? How often do they really want to see you, and what are the best days and times for them?
You see, client satisfaction isn’t enough. What really matters is whether you’re making a client happy. If you’re just doing as well as your competitors could do, you’ve become an interchangeable commodity. Imagine if when your client saw you, their face lit up in a genuine smile. How would you feel if they called you for business advice? When you develop that kind of relationship, you don’t need to worry about some competitor trying to steal that client.
Moving from simply satisfying clients to making them happy involved more than a subtle shift in the way we did business. It marked the beginning of our growth into the industry leader we’ve become, and it underlies our approach to serving our clients. It’s when we moved from being just another vendor to being a trusted advisor and peer.
The more data we share, the more questions we ask. We tell the client we’re meeting our SLAs. Then we ask them how things feel for them. Maybe we discover despite the SLAs; they’re frustrated with the number of escalations over the past several weeks. Let’s find out why that’s happening and see what we can do to address that.
We researched metrics to see if there was an easy way to assess client happiness. First call resolution is the industry standard for measuring performance, but we discovered a more effective way to monitor happiness is a measure called first level resolution. What percentage of the time do we resolve the issue the first time we touch the ticket? What can we do to reduce the number of escalations? Can our team develop knowledge in the subject areas leading to the most escalations? Fewer escalations mean a happier client staff, which usually means a happy client.
We take pretty seriously what many competitors would brush off as simple gripes. For example, Netfor analyzes the data when a client complains about long hold times. Often that happens during times when calls tend to spike. Long hold times are frustrating. So we developed metrics capturing the average longest on-hold time across an entire month. We look for reasons behind the peaks and seek ways to mitigate them.
If a client says a customer told them one of our agents was rude, we’ll pull the recordings. If the customer was right, we’ll own up and address it. Or we may pass a copy of the recording along to the client and say, “Could you please listen to the conversation because we’re not hearing any rudeness?” We want to give the complainant the benefit of the doubt. Ultimately, our goal is to fix the situation so it never happens again.
You can develop relationships with happy clients. You get to know them so you can make their world better, and that makes them happier. That’s also why we bring Service Delivery team members to client meetings. When clients and the people who are acting on their behalf get to know each other, good things happen. And when a new CIO arrives and sees how happy their team is with ours, they’re less likely to change directions.
It can be tough to ask a client what we’d have to do to lose their trust, but if we don’t know precisely what that is, how can we make sure we prevent it? Anyone can keep the client satisfied. Netfor would rather make the extra effort to keep the customer happy.
