The past few weeks have made painfully clear how difficult it is for many companies to answer the fluctuating service demand and how challenging it seems to be for businesses to demonstrate flexibility when times are getting tough. Millions are spent every year to understand the demands of clients and customers - and still companies seem to be surprised on a regular basis when clients actually dare to ask for service, support or advice.
Winter, snow and ice ... pretty predictable phenomenon that seems to take a vast number of businesses by surprise. Crowded streets, delayed trains and cancelled flights, all these things can and will happen - and you know what? Even the most powerful airline or public transport organization cannot do anything about it. And people fully accept that, believe me.
But what people do not accept are organizations being not prepared ... or rather not being as flexible as they so often claim to be. Customers understand that a plane cannot take off on a slippery runway and people do understand that sometimes a parcel can take a day or two to arrive - but they want to be told and they want to be given information. And we all know that this information is very often available ... somewhere, somehow within the organization.
In my opinion, dialogue-focused customer service and making information available for clients and customers is key for businesses to demonstrate their flexibility - and it always pays off!
Yes, times are tough and not many businesses can afford big investments in their customer service but actually customers do understand that. And that´s not what flexibility is about anyway.
The challenge is to make most of the existing infrastructure, increase the efficiency of employees and sometimes, it is just a question of common sense. How can an airline facing a large number of canceled and delayed flights refuse to increase the number of seats in its contact centers for a couple of days? In a modern contact center businesses can easily increase and decrease the number of seats, for example by including agents who work from home, without spending too much time or money. Most organizations have CRM-systems in place. Sometimes it just takes an external consultant to find some undiscovered opportunities on how an organization can get most out of its customer data and how this information can be shared much better within the organization. Maybe even the contact center communications system can be connected to the CRM-solution?
Products and services become more and more interchangeable, we all know that. If you do not want to compete on price alone, then here is a thought: Show some flexibility in your customer service. And obviously that does come for a certain price - but it does not automatically mean spending a fortune on technology.
Pekka Porkka is General Manager, SAP Business Communications Management (Editor's note: SAP sponsors The Social Customer)
