Business Metrics that Add Up to Chapter 11
I’ve heard that if you want to maximize your profits you need to minimize your costs. One rather simple yet clueless practice I’ve experienced first hand as a customer is the ‘drop / ignore customers that cost too much to support’.
You would think that measuring which customers cost more for support is a straight forward and simple thing to do. You count the amount of time spent and the number of times the customer calls or emails for support. Customers that call too often and cost too much are put into a queue to be ignored or told to take their business elsewhere. This sort of thing can be written into your business process and implemented by your staff. The only thing is, if you’re not watching, your staff get motivated to start bunting any customer they want into the ‘dump’ queue and before you know it you’re losing customers you shouldn’t be.
If you’re dealing with all of your customers the same way, you could be making a big mistake. It is true that not all customers are worth keeping. Customers that are hostile / abusive should be dropped because they are disruptive and harmful to your staff and that hurts your bottom line. However, customers that require more help and interact more often aren’t necessarily more costly and therefore less valuable. Your support center metrics must capture the difference between a customer with a legitimate problem and a customer that requires services that you may not wish to provide.
If the wrong metrics are being used by your company’s support center to measure success then there’s a good chance that the wrong incentives are in place for your support team. For instance, they might be more focused on resolving a customer issue quickly rather than ensuring that it is resolved. This small shift in attitude can result in a big difference in the quality of the interaction with your customers.
Complex issues that require more time to solve might be getting passed on from support person to support person and never get resolved. Thereby increasing the number of interactions with the customer. As important as it might be to measure how much support effort is required for a given customer, it is even more important to determine whether it is because the product or service needs to be fixed, the support staff needs additional training, or the customer is just a bad apple and needs to be dropped. If you can’t tell the difference or if you’re leaving these decisions to your support team to figure out for themselves, you can expect to lose more valuable customers. Even perhaps lose a few customers that will share their opinion with others about how your company sucks and recommend a company that can provide much better service.
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