The Change: Heightened Customer Awareness and the Need for Intelligent Customer Management

It is not surprising to us nowadays that customer loyalty no longer retains its old validity. Often when tracking down the contact methods of a company whose customer management or customer care department is on the poor side, the first search result you will find is a customer action forum, in which pages and pages of posts are being written, detailing numerous customers’ feelings of abandonment and frustration, and their correspondence is often more invective than praise.

Never before have customers had such up-to-date information about a company’s habits, and it’s also possible to say that never has the customer been so informed about the history, the changes, and the current popular opinion of a service provider or brand. What’s more is that customers generally know the advantage of this; it is not dead knowledge, it affects their choices over staying put or switching companies every day. Things move fast; the term empowered customer already seems like a crusty bit of nomenclature.

For a customer management team, this presents a huge problem, but also points towards the future way in which the customer will have to be maintained in order for businesses to carry on customer cycles and to develop new consumer groups. The pain comes from trying to treat these empowered customers in the same way as was previously possible, ignoring this new widely-available knowledge that the consumer-base is privy to.

There are several ways to illustrate how customer management can be refined to cater to the new demands of the empowered customer. In areas such as call centre functions, monitoring and driving first call resolution ratios can be done by utilizing the skills and knowledge base of outsourcing vendors. For insurance companies and other areas where customer types vary significantly, customer management can ensure that hot leads can be patched through to veteran closers to clinch sales, giving customer satisfaction and ensuring that the most skilled personnel are being deployed where they are most useful. This example illustrates that the new demands of customer management are strategic, requiring only that the existence of the empowered customer be recognized.

In this sphere, customer empowerment demands employee empowerment. Even without a customer management outsourcing vendor taking control of the majority of a company’s customer contact centers and functions, a quick browse of a customer action forum shows that customers are acutely aware of the rung of the hierarchical ladder at which they enter in a call, and how far they can press their demands. This means that to keep first call resolution levels (and therefore customer satisfaction levels) high, customer management requires training and encouragement of team initiative.

There is no easy way to address this fully, but as in all business scenarios the ability to adapt will be the difference between staying competitive, and being the ship from which you watch your customer bases jump.