How do you crack the challenge of balancing customer experience and cost control?...especially today when economics are under extreme pressure. This is the dilemma that they were faced with at Lenovo.
Making it work required them to overcome many barriers, the first of which was philosophical: to change their vision to one that was "outside in." When you focus on how the customer sees you, you find out things that you really didn't want to know. But it was critical to their competitive position. They had to have an independent "voice of the customer" to drive the customer delight program.
Net Promoter concepts fit right in with this, because it's absolutely critical to have more promoters and not to have detractors. Why?
Firstly, because you must RETAIN customers. If you want to increase customer delight while scaling costs (which was their goal), you simply can not afford to lose customers. Otherwise, the economics of cost scaling break down, because it costs 4 times as much to acquire a customer as it does to retain one.
Secondly, because SOCIAL MEDIA has opened up experiences and information. You can't hide from real experiences anymore. Chris told a story (from one of his previous employers) about a customer whose laptop battery caught fire while he was waiting and doing work in the airport. As soon as it happened, the customer videotaped the computer (on fire) and posted it on Facebook. The company found this online. Information flows fast, and you can't hide from that.
Another big point for them was to RETIRE the term SATISFACTION from their service vocabulary. In Chris' mind, satisfaction is "just OK." Delight is the word they focus on...it is what creates the emotional outcome they are looking for. If they can truly delight their customers, then customers will reward them with emotional attachment to their brand. The can't afford to give customers the choice between two equals. Instead, their goal is to stand out.
So, with that goal, they set out to benchmark where they stood.
At the start, they realized they had a long way to go. Initial benchmarks from their Satmetrix feedback system indicated that their service levels were far below where they needed to be.
This galvanized the organization for major change. Chris described it as "Revolution" versus "Evolution." The customer's "unfiltered" voice was what they needed to drive the revolutionary change. They dedicated themselves to achieve best in class service....and that's when the work started.
Chris was frank about some of the people challenges they had to face, which included leadership changes (to ensure buy-in for the new vision was genuine), and a laser sharp focus on eradicating gaming by front line agents.
They also established a structured approach for gathering feedback, working with Satmetrix, rolling it out first to a key group of countries -- to prove out the process. Then moving into a multi-lingual rollout (don't underestimate the subtleties of translation...the way you word questions can impact your response rate and your brand perception). This feedback was connected to their Lean Six Sigma process initiatives. And also to their executive agenda. The CEO has included Customer Delight metrics among the top 5 metrics for business performance.
What have the results been?
In the past year, their customer delight metrics have improved steadily by 16%, and at the same time have decreased the cost of service delivery by 15%. At the same time, they have increased service revenue by 20% year-on-year in a down economy.
The program has been self-funding. The executive escalation team has been reduced by 21% because they don't have as many complaints coming through the system anymore.
But they haven't finished yet. His biggest challenge today, on the back of these improvements, is complacency. They can not rest on their laurels, they will continue to push performance forward to drive delight and be best-in-class at what they do.
