During the downturn, companies have quickly and deeply cut into their headcount, postponed capital investments and otherwise conserved cash. At least some companies, however, have focused on improving their customer satisfaction, with notable results.
According to the Wall Street Journal today, the University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is at its highest level since the index began 12 years ago.
Companies cited in the Journal article include Sprint, which has had a high-profile campaign to improve its customer service since CEO Dan Hesse joined the company in 2007. Comcast, Southwest Airlines and Cheesecake Factory are also mentioned.
Sprint has focused more on customer issue resolution than on minimizing call times, according to the Journal. The result has been a net decrease in calls to customer service and the higher satisfaction level (up 12.5 points, according to the Journal). Cheesecake Factory has been surveying their customers, analyzing patterns, and implementing changes based on what they learn.
Readers of this blog know that we've endorsed both of these actions (though we feel that collecting and evaluating customer narratives is far superior to surveying).
Cheesecake Factory CEO David Overton said this in his statement about the company's most recent earnings announcement:
Of particular note is our ongoing, steady improvement in guest satisfaction scores at a time when we are streamlining our cost structure. We are carefully balancing our cost containment efforts so as not to reduce the experience that guests have in our restaurants, and we are pleased with the results that we are delivering in both areas. We continue to focus on ways to better align our operations with current sales volumes and identified a second round of cost management initiatives that we are already rolling out. Ultimately, these efforts should aid in our goal of rebuilding margins back toward historical levels over time.
Overton's statement points to another opportunity with story-gathering. What you take away from a product can be as important for profitability as what you add. Customers don't value everything a company does, but can't really articulate what they don't value. Companies looking to reduce service without impacting customer satisfaction should experiment with removing certain features, then collect stories to see if the removal has a big or small (or no) impact on the customer experience.
Focusing customer service on problem-solving and making small, simple changes to address customer pain points in products or services is a very cheap way to improve results. And that's good in any economy.
Related posts:
The invaluable stories inside customer-service calls
Customers Are Talking: The Hot Line
Using values: connecting deeply with customers
Link to original post