3 innovazioni nel Customer Service per non deludere mai più i vostri clienti

3 ottimi esempi di Customer Service innovativo, perché spesso prodotto e customer experience non bastano.

No matter how perfect your product, customer experience, or service is otherwise, in the eyes of the customer it’s broken if you deliver it late.

Worse, the concept of what constitutes on-time delivery is the most movable of moving targets.

While timeliness has been a commercial expectation since the dawn of the industrial age, today, in our ultra-accelerated world of ‘‘Why do I have to wait a full .8 seconds for a web page to load on my tablet?,’’ customers are expecting speedier service than they ever have before.

And there’s no turning back: What seemed speedy last year may seem snail-like today. Companies in today’s marketplace need to come up with solutions that stay in step with customers’ ever more extreme perception of what ‘‘in a timely fashion’’ means. Because if they don’t, their competition will step in to fill the timeliness void.

Here are three innovative ways to address the idea of timeliness that you should consider emulating–and that you should be taken seriously if your competitors introduce something similar:

• Marriotts 5-10-20 menu (for its informal and fast casual restaurants):This menu that Marriott has introduced in its more casual lounges and restaurants is organized by whether the food takes five, ten, or twenty minutes to prepare, and does away with traditional groupings like appetizer, entrée and so forth.

This is smart thinking. Because, really, what so many business travelers, breakfasters running late, and lunch-breakers want to know is: ‘‘How long’s it going to take to get my food?’’ Without the timings printed on the menu, the alternative is to ask the server ‘‘What’s fast?’’ Which too often brings the server’s knee-jerk reaction: ‘‘Oh,everythingpretty quick.’’

Which, of course, couldn’t possibly be true. This response just means the server has no idea, or the prep time per menu item has wild variability. And who can afford to miss the boarding call for her plane, watching that ‘‘pretty fast’’ food fail to arrive?

• USAA’s MyAccount software (and the MyAccount functionality of some great service, manufacturing, construction,  SaaS and B2B companies): When your company is in the business of making something custom, or something with a long timeline, there’s risk of customers losing their patience, and ultimately their faith in you, when you aren’t in touch with the customer throughout the process saying “still nothing to show, but we haven’t forgotten you.”

A great way to say this, in effect, to your customers is to build project-tracking/MyAccount type functionality that permits your customer to check on the progress of their project 24/7.  It’s much better for your customer to wake up in a panic at 2 am wondering what’s up with their project, log in and see  (with USAA, after a fender bender) “pending contact from opposing insurance company” or in a manufacturing context to see “waiting for plating” than to have nightmares or a sleepless night worrying that their project has fallen into a black hole.

Uber App, images courtesy Uber blog

The Uber App

• Uber, Easytaxi and similar app-enhanced services:  Although an Uber or Easytaxi driver can’t legally drive faster than any other, allowing customers very clear control over the timeliness aspect that can be controlled (when the car will show up, where it is when it is en route) is a step in the right direction as far as timeliness is concerned. Be careful: If someone else comes up with this functionality in your industry and you lag behind in response, it can be very disruptive to your company’s wellbeing.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/micahsolomon/2014/09/05/great-customer-service-is-defective-if-its-late-solutions-to-consider-from-marriott-uber-usaa/

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