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  • Going Beyond Responsiveness to Meet Customer Needs
  • The Customer Confidence Crisis – Why Now is the Time to Rebuild Your Customers’ Trust
  • Martin Scorsese and Confident Customers
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In our work with clients, we help them to understand the confidence that their key customers have in their current and future ability to meet their needs. Among other things, many clients are interested to know whether their responsiveness to customers is perceived as a core strength or an opportunity for greater focus and improvement. Using our Customer Review process, our clients often include responsiveness as one of the performance factors they ask their customers to evaluate. The goal is to assess customers’ perceptions of such things as accessibility (are you there when I call?), willingness to listen, desire to help, and speed of response.

But is being highly responsive enough?

After reading comments in thousands of our clients’ customer interviews over the past ten years, it has become apparent that responsiveness doesn’t quite capture what customers are looking for. Any significant customer – particularly those that are highly dependent upon their suppliers – has a minimum expectation that they’re going to be able to reach a live person who can help them when the need arises. Finding a friendly voice at the other end of the phone to help with a quality glitch or shipping delays might be enough to solve the short-term problems, but customers are looking for more from their key suppliers. Responsiveness is what customers expect, but resolution is what they really need.

When asked about the responsiveness of their suppliers, here’s a paraphrase of what many customers say:

“You do a fine job making sure I can reach someone. You are also good at acknowledging my initial request for help or for information. I truly believe that the customer service person or the technical support expert is interested in helping me solve my issue, and most of the time they do. The problem comes when the issue to be solved is beyond their level of authority or expertise – when others in your organization have to get involved. So yes, you generally meet my needs for the initial response, but getting to the point of resolution on a more complex issue – that’s another story.”

In order to go beyond that first level of responsiveness, companies need to make sure that the people on the front line have a defined process for getting the resources required to resolve a customer concern. Companies spend a great deal of time and money equipping their customer service personnel with knowledge, skills and tools to solve and track customer issues – but the job is not yet complete. Beyond that first call for help, customers want:

• A plan for resolving the issue
• A timeline for implementing the plan
• Regular status updates from a trusted contact
• Direct interaction with those actually working on the solution
• Clear and candid communication when the solution is not forthcoming

The takeaway: For business-to-business suppliers and service providers, emphasizing the responsiveness of your frontline employees isn’t sufficient. The goal must be resolution – a shared understanding with the customer on the outcome of a particular need or request.

Eric Engwall, Managing Partner
E.G. Insight

Over the past few weeks, the media has been buzzing about the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer study (details here). It measures and reports the level of trust the general public has in entities like corporations, government, even friends and family. Some of the results are unexpected, such as the rise globally in the credibility people see in messages directly from the CEO and the lack of trust people have in their “inner circle” social network.

Some have critiqued the study, others have praised it, but it’s hard to deny the fact that the last two years have shaken the public’s trust in business leaders, especially in the financial services, automotive, and aerospace industries.

Not surprisingly, this breakdown of trust has also happened in business-to-business relationships. Organizations worldwide are doing more with less. Fewer resources often leads to declines in quality and delivery performance as well as less interaction with key customers.

The end result? Less trust.

And, of course, in business-to-business relationships trust is critical to loyalty, growth, and profitability. When channel partners, distributors, or OEMs can’t trust their suppliers to provide the products and services they need to meet the needs of the end user, both the bottom line and the future relationship suffer.

If your customers have lost some of their trust, the business impact – in both the short and long term – is significant. So how do you build (or rebuild) customers’ trust?

In the work we do with our clients, it happens in four steps:

Address and resolve current issues
Address the issues that you know your customers are already facing. Building trust without meeting your customers’ core needs is impossible, so allocate time and resources to resolving the most pressing issues. For the issues you can’t solve in the short term, communicate your long-term issue resolution plans to your customers.

Proactively listen to your customers
Collecting feedback from customers does two things: first, it lets you solve problems that you may not have known about, secondly, it reinforces the fact that you’re working with your customers, not against them. This builds trust because you are making a concerted effort to listen proactively instead of merely reacting to issues. When possible, the most effective way to emphasize these messages is in a face-to-face setting.

Act on your customers’ feedback
Taking targeted action on what your customers tell you may seem like common sense, but it’s not always common practice. Make your follow-up steps – taking action and communicating – part of your comprehensive plan for collecting the feedback. Align the appropriate resources, instill accountability, and be diligent. Your customers’ trust depends on it.

Continue communicating
This is the step that builds trust. Listen, take action, and let your customers know what actions you’ve taken as a result of their feedback. And if you can’t solve all their problems, tell them that too. Demonstrate that you heard what they said and that you’re making efforts to help them. Just taking action isn’t always enough; you need to make it clear to your customers that they can trust you to improve.

These four proven steps can put you back into trusted advisor or partner status with your customers. In the years to come, your customers’ confidence will be a differentiator.

Now is the time when your customers’ trust can be rebuilt. What are you doing to rebuild it?

Nick Wassenberg, Research Analyst
E.G. Insight