Ever Send Your Customer a Sad Card?

There's a big difference between being committed to customer service and actually doing something about it. Often, customer service teams will do a big survey on what customers think of their organisation, which will then be filed away and quietly forgotten.

Derek Buchanan, CEO of software company Episys, recognised many years ago that good customer service is often disruptive process that nevertheless has to be constantly addressed if you want to keep your customers happy. He learned early on, as a government helpdesk agent in his teens, that if you stand out in terms of customer service, customers will go out of their way to deal with you and you alone.

When he took up the reins at Episys, he was greeted with a demotivated workforce used to working under a blame culture. His first step was to nurture a corporate culture where making mistakes was an acceptable part of learning and improving.
The naming of his customer service campaign, 'Ever Been Disappointed?' is a recognition that mistakes have to be acknowledged and dealt with, not buried.

Once a customer has had time to assess the value of his company's products and services, they are sent an after-sales pack with contact details, along with 'happy' and 'sad' cards -- each with enough pre-paid postage to be sent from anywhere in the world.

If Episys staff get a sad card back, they immediately call the customer to learn the nature of the dissatisfaction and agree the process for improvement. They agree the frequency of any subsequent communication. At the end of the process, the customer is asked to sign an agreement of acceptance that the problem has been solved. The whole process takes 90 days, with people at the highest levels in the company involved.

"Most of the time, when there is a problem, the proprietor is unaware. They generally want their customers to be happy with their service," says Buchanan. This process makes sure problems are fed back up to senior managers so that they are made aware of the level of service their teams are operating under.

The Ever Been Disappointed campaign is the sharp edge of Buchanan's customer service push, but he's made an effort to change the culture behind it too. Staff are awarded a base-line shareholding in the company, enforcing their commitment to its health. Employees who make a forgivable mistake are given a T-Shirt with the slogan 'I've had a shocker' to take the sting out of the mishap.

Here's his advice on how to improve your customer service

• Make sure your customer service programme is not a gimic that sounds grand, but actually has little substance. There has to be a genuine process behind the snappy slogans.
• Make sure there is a common process for everyone to follow. It's no good just to be committed to making the customer happy. Everyone of them has to be dealt with in an even-handed way and employees know what is expected of them if there is a problem
• Make sure there is a defined process of escalation for the customer. Often, once a deal is done the senior executives are no longer accessible by the customer. They have to be available to some extent -- no one expects them to be permanently on hand.
• Go through the complaints process yourself to see that it works.