In today’s highly competitive environment and period of recession businesses are faced with a difficult dilemma: they need to provide exceptional customer service, a critical differentiator that improves customer loyalty, whilst delivering a return on investment (RoI) that satisfies the stakeholders.

1. Customer Service – a necessary cost or profit opportunity?
In today’s highly competitive environment and period of recession businesses are faced with a difficult dilemma:
they need to provide exceptional customer service, a critical differentiator that improves customer loyalty, whilst
delivering a return on investment (RoI) that satisfies the stakeholders.
So can this be achieved? We know it can because we have delivered this to 2 global automotive manufacturers in
the last 6 months. Through the work that we did we forced a paradigm shift in our clients’ expectations, resulting in
the Customer Relationship Centre (CRC) being seen as an area that needs investment as it can generate profits
for the organisation.
This paper takes you through a journey that presents the strategy we deployed in our European and Australian
Markets. The journey started by outlining the practical ways in which exceptional customer service can be
generated, through to the impact it has on building loyalty. By then identifying ways that cost savings can be made
and implementing any actions resulting from that, the end result for the client is an increase in profit for their
business.
Delivering Excellent Customer Service
Step 1: Shared goal — Primary Quality Metric
3 Steps to Excellent Throughout the course of our work, we have ensured that the
Customer Service entire company is focussed on one thing – delivering the best
possible customer service. This involved a change of mindset
Step 1: Shared goal away from the “traditional” call centre metrics of answering times
and abandonment rates, to focus exclusively on the things that
Step 2 : Understand the
improve customer satisfaction. A customer does care if you don’t
trigger points
answer the calls within an acceptable time and not meeting this
Step 3: Roadmap
time will reduce customer satisfaction but meeting with times does
not improve customer satisfaction. At Percepta we will have the
appropriate service levels in place and will be meeting these but
will be focusing on other important drivers of customer
satisfaction.

2. Step 2: Data Analytics to identify Trigger Points
This step involves a deep dive analysis of customer satisfaction results in order to identify the factors associated
with improving customer satisfaction. In this example, analysis of previous customer satisfaction survey returns
showed that the primary cause of dissatisfaction is actual resolution time versus expected resolution time, with a
strong secondary factor of the frequency of contacting the customer with updates relating to their issue. The data
demonstrated that satisfaction was negatively affected when the resolution took longer than the customer had
anticipated ie simple issues the customer expects to be resolved quickly. High satisfaction was achieved by the
centre instigating regular contact with the customer.
Step 3: Intervention Strategy (Roadmap)
Using the data gathered from the deep dive, we then implemented a number of systemic checks to ensure that we
were able to identify customers who were in danger of becoming dissatisfied with the service they had received. It
was important to ensure that such cases were identified before any negative satisfaction impact was realised and
this was done by the creation of an “Intervention Strategy”. Using time as the primary factor, the intervention
strategy identifies customer cases that are approaching that trigger point and promotes those cases for review.
When a case reaches the trigger point, it is logged, reviewed by a senior staff member and classified in one of four
categories that we have identified. These categories reflect the departments whose input are required to resolve
the issues. Once the case has been reviewed and categorised, the case is then escalated to the appropriate
channel and tracked until resolution.
Surprise and Delight
At the analytical phase we also identified that a courtesy follow up
call made 7-10 days after the issue had been resolved provided
customers with service that they deemed above and beyond their
expectations. A follow up call in isolation will not magically
transform an unhappy customer into a very satisfied one, it can
however change a customer from being very dissatisfied to
ambivalent, or from somewhat satisfied to extremely satisfied.
Using this approach, we have converted customers who may
otherwise have been neither detractors nor promoters of the
brand into powerful advocates for the brand’s customer service
and likewise changing the mindset of strong critics of the brand to
ambivalence. Improving satisfaction with vocal detractors of the
brand is an extremely important and often overlooked aspect of
customer satisfaction.

3. Delivering on what you commit
Customer Comments
The strong secondary factor that was identified was regular
“Could not have been better even
contact with the customer, combined with delivering upon what we
following up after the event”
commit to. Every customer is provided with a date and time of
when to expect a call from the centre and we ensure that our
“They were very helpful and contacted
promises are kept. If the case has not progressed as far as we
me when they advised they would.”
would have anticipated a call will still be made to the customer
where we will provide an update on where the case is and give
“Very good, he really cared and
reassurances on when the next stages will happen.
followed me up and kept me informed”
The results
In Australia, using the approach above, the centre recorded a sustained increase in customer satisfaction using Net
Promoter Scores (NPS), culminating in recent NPS results of +43.1%. This great result was driven by the key
approach of focussing on increasing every customer’s satisfaction, regardless of the outcome of their issue. This
has meant that our most recent results show that over 60% of customers who contacted the centre rated the
service they received as either 9/10 or 10/10.
In Europe the approach has resulted in an increase in
Impact of Improvements on Promoter score
the volume of promoters from 12% to 21% and a
70%
reduction of detractors from 26% to 14%. Overall these
changes have resulted in incremental sales of 60%
£14million. 50%
40% B efore
%
The approach we implemented also drove through cost 30% A fter
savings via improved processes and consistent 20%
methodology. In 2008, through improvements made to
10%
the car hire process we reduced the average “vehicle
0%
off the road” days from 18 to 5, translating into a saving Detractors Passives Promoters
of £1.5m for the client. This has made the service the Category
valuable one it is today.
By contributing to increased sales and implementing process improvement to save costs, Percepta were able to
return and overall RoI of £5.89 for every £1 spent to these clients in 2008. Thus, cementing the relationship as one
of a partner from that of a supplier.
For more information on how Percepta can assist you in transitioning your customer service centre to a profit centre
please call 0141 571 3400, email uk.enquiries@percepta.com or visit www.percepta.com/europe.