What do the companies known for stellar customer service—like USAA, Amazon, Zappos, Marriott—have in common? They go to school on their customers. They have ways to continually learn about their customers’ ever-changing needs, expectations, and aspirations. They turn frontline insight into valued improvements and new practices.
So, who is in charge of equipping your organization with customer learning skills? Is it market research or the training and development function?
Consider a case in which the customers of a large B2B company pleaded for help on ways to remain on the cutting edge of their industry. “You should be our mentors,” complained one major customer to the chief operating officer. “Don’t just give us information, give us helpful acumen; don’t just give us great service, we need great teaching,” said the customer.
The COO of the B2B company turned to the market research department for answers and got back a clichéd “do a study” response. Frustrated, the COO then asked the training department for help. Their first suggestion was to stop ending calls at the call center with the all-too-familiar: “Is there anything else I can help you with?” Instead, they suggested ending calls with: “What can I help you learn more about today?”
Turning a closed question largely focused on reducing call handle time into an open-ended question focused on learning made a dramatic difference. Not only did first contact resolution scores go up, so did their customer sat scores. And, call center reps were now up-selling products considerably more than before.
Second case in point: What is the real reason customers leave your organization? If that question is asked from a winback marketing approach, you will get a very different answer than if you ask it from a learning approach aimed at gaining understandings designed to create improvements that reduce customer turnover.
A large financial services company routinely asked departing customers their reasons for leaving. What were the most common answers? Price and customer needs changed. But, when the company launched a customer forensics study, they learned price and changed needs accounted for less than 20 percent of customer churn. It was customer experience issues that accounted for more than 60 percent of the departures. The key to understanding the real issue was a difference in the data collection—a focus on learning, not one on sales and marketing.
What role does T&D—the custodians of organizational learning—have in customer service? Unfortunately, too many T&D functions believe their only purview is customer service training—learning events aimed at teaching frontline service-providing employees with the tools to deliver good service. Yet, without a learning perspective woven into every customer-related component of the organization, it will quickly become outdated, ill-equipped, and abandoned as customers switch to organizations that demonstrate they “know and understand them.”
