Avoid the Customer's Hammer!
Gary Lemke at CRM Advocate has recently been blogging about "Hammer Lady" and what kind of grievance redressal options can be given to customers when they are disenchanted with traditional channels of customer Service. Hammer Lady is a famous disgruntled customer of Comcast who took a hammer to the nearest Comcast office and destroyed office equipment before inquiring if she finally had their attention. It transpired that her phone connection had been out for a week and she couldn't get anyone at Comcast to fix it.
Not all customers would take such a drastic step when they feel they haven't received the service they deserve. Some may fret and fume; others may bad mouth the company or product to friends and colleagues. Some others may be more patient and follow through with the published escalation channels, if available. But in today's age of social media, the "hammer" can also be taken into cyber space and what was earlier a potential loss of goodwill restricted to a few acquaintances of a disgruntled customer can quickly take up a frightening form on the internet, thanks to social media.
If companies today want to avoid such pitfalls they need to quickly establish effective grievance redressal mechanisms to reach out to disgruntled customers before they take out the "hammer". Such mechanisms may take many forms but to be successful it has to have a few necessary ingredients.
Credibility. It is not something that can be built quickly but sustained service mechanisms to deal with unhappy customers can lead to success stories which can then be leveraged to build a culture of service excellence. Your claims on service delivery may also be taken seriously through widespread marketing and well publicized awareness campaigns. A Money Back Guarantee or a 5 Year Free Service offer can help.
Make it Easy. Your Grievance Mechanism is not going to win you any fans on Facebook if the web link is hidden deep in the bowels of your website that generates an auto reply about "looking into it" and vaguely mentions that it is "glad to receive the feedback". If you already have a Facebook page, YouTube channel or other frequented forums on your website use them to address miffed customers.
Dedicate Resources. If your regular service folks couldn't solve the customer's problem in the first place, it wouldn't make sense directing the same customer back to the same service team. So don't just change the channel, change the people, change the process, change the training and only then will you be able to change the results.
Some companies are already innovating in this area. Just last month, SBI Life, an Indian State run Life Insurance Company announced "SOLVE", an SMS based customer care initiative for prompt grievance redressal by guaranteeing attendance to redressal within 24 hours. Customers are able to register their grievances about SBI Life's service by merely sending SMS 'SOLVE' to 56161. The message along with customers' mobile number, date and time of message is automatically registered at the central server of SBI Life's central processing centre. A special customer service team exclusively trained and dedicated for the SMS SOLVE service, calls the customer, takes note of his grievances and addresses it.
It's early days yet though. Watch this space.
