While I was driving along the motorway recently,
a truck threw up a stone that cracked my windscreen. When I got home I phoned
State Insurance to lodge a claim. Much to my surprise they were great to deal
with. I was able to get through to a live human being before my next birthday
and she was very helpful. No unnecessary questions were asked. No obstacles
were placed in my path. The woman I spoke with was friendly, polite and efficient.
I even got more than I expected because I thought I would have find a
windshield repairer and contact them with a claim number. But no, I was told
someone from Smith & Smith would be in touch with me within four hours. In
short the experience was wonderful and I was delighted.
Then the fun began.
Within three hours I had a text from Smith &
Smith asking me to phone an 0800 number, push 1 then 1 and quote the
registration number of my car, which they kindly listed in the text.
Unfortunately it was the wrong registration number. Still, that was no big deal
and I rang the number as requested. Sure enough I got the two prompts and
pushed 1 each time. Then I waited. Eventually I got a recorded message
apologising for the delay and saying someone would be with me soon. They were
not. After getting the "sorry for the delay" message several times, I
heard the phone ringing at the other end. Great, I thought, now I am finally
being connected to someone who can help me. My optimism was premature. What I
got was a recorded message saying I would be put through to somebody who could
help me. The phone rang again and this time it was answered by an actual
person. I told her why I was calling. "OK," she said. "But they
are all busy right now. I'll get somebody to phone you back."
It seemed to me I was right back where I
started. I hung up, and replied to the original text saying, "You asked me
to call you. I did. It was a waste of time. Would you please call me?" By
the end of the day nobody had called so I called again and this time I got
through and an appointment was made. I was told I would have to go to my
nearest branch of Smith & Smith because the type of car I owned meant they
could not come to me and replace the windscreen at my place. So, I took my car
to Smith & Smith and killed two and a half hours while they did the work.
When I returned to collect my car, I was told the windscreen had been replaced
but it was not the correct windscreen and I would need to have another
windscreen installed the following week. To make my life easier, I was told,
they would come to me to do the work. I asked why I had to bring it in the
first time but they could come to me the second time. There was no answer to
that.
State Insurance clearly understand how important
it is to provide their customers with a great experience. More importantly,
they seem to understand that customers want to deal with companies that are
easy to do business with, and with people who are efficient, friendly, helpful
and polite. State also knows customers like to be delighted, which comes from
doing something above and beyond what the customer expects. What State does not
appear to realise is that all their hard work is being undone by one of their
key suppliers. Consequently, my overall customer experience getting my
windscreen repaired was less than average.
Are you in the same situation? I expect you are
passionate about giving your customers a great experience and work very hard to
do that. Is all your hard work being undone by one of your key suppliers? Would
you know if it was?
Remember when ISO 9000 was all the rage? Many
companies required their suppliers gained ISO certification because it would
mean they would have to demonstrate their processes were effective (they gave
customers what they wanted) and efficient (there was minimal waste). ISO also
requires companies to identify areas of non-performance, report them and fix
them. Therefore, a customer like State could easily audit a supplier such as Smith
& Smith to assess how well they are performing. Most importantly, if State
found performance issues with a supplier, they could see whether the supplier
was taking steps to improve their performance.
You could require your suppliers
to be ISO accredited but here are six actions you can take to find out whether
they are giving your customers the kind of experience you want them to have:
1. Make
follow up phone calls to customers you have placed in the hands of your
suppliers to find out what kind of experience they had.
2. Mystery shop your suppliers.
3. Ask
your suppliers to show you data from their customer satisfaction surveys,
complaints registers or customer feedback systems. If they cannot do this,
alarm bells should sound.
4. Ask
to see their plan for managing the customer experience.
5. Make
a site visit and talk to both management and frontline staff about what they
see are their customer care issues and what they are doing to fix them.
6. Insist your suppliers set up a Corrective
Action System where things that go wrong are logged and the action taken to fix
them is recorded.
In a crowded and competitive
market, it is difficult enough to get and keep customers without having your
suppliers undermining what you are doing.
