|
April 1999 Volume 3.06
The Mission for Your Customers
Continues...
5.0 Survey Key Markets & Processes------->
To cover this step, three articles are required. This article
focuses on the second of three parts; obtain and send sample to
fieldwork provider and monitor and manage their quality.
Have we got it right? Companies need to ask this about the contact
details they are holding on their customers.
How current is your information? Very current, you say? Think again.
Key details such as contact names, titles, telephone and fax numbers,
area codes, postal and e-mail addresses and other details change
all too frequently.
Did we get it right? Companies often make follow-up calls to customers
to check whether work is being carried out correctly. They also
need to ask whether the customer's contact details are still correct.
A marketing management database is critical for keeping the contact
information current.
And tracking the previous details is just the tip of the iceberg.
Have you categorised customers due to spend, potential spend, or
other criteria? These categories are very helpful for stratified
sampling techniques for surveys or marketing campaigns. If you do
not have this information or want to increase the quality of your
existing customer information, a few things will assist with getting
started:
* Follow-up on sales staff and customer centre feedback reports
of won/lost customers
* Note customer preferences and feedback from recent promotion call-ins
or queries
* Obtain targeted databases
* Track all of the undeliverable mails and e-mails
If you are looking for a random sample across specific regions,
select a fieldwork provider who uses random digit dialing across
the entire telephone number range, rather than one who draws the
sample from a phone book. With telephone books many numbers are
disconnected prior to publication, while other numbers are not published.
Now that you are confident about the sample, you have to entrust
this information along with the questionnaire to a fieldwork company.
To effectively monitor and manage the fieldwork quality ask these
questions:
* What quality standards will be complied with?
* What are the specifications to ensure non-sampling error is minimised?
* Who will be doing the work?
* What is the workplan and is there room for flexibility?
* Can the call centre be visited on an impromptu basis, or can formal
visits be arranged to monitor the fieldwork?
* What is the agreement on updates, turnaround times, follow-up
work and additional services?
* What is the procedure when the vendor has a recommendation for
changes to the questionnaire?
The fieldwork must be managed to agreed standards and guidelines
such as the international ESOMAR market research standards (or equivalent
national market research standards). Companies also need to consider
their unique issues when monitoring and managing the fieldwork vendor's
quality. For example, the fieldwork vendor must comply with internal
company policies on quality and process management. Effective monitoring
and management of market research quality will allow people in your
company to use the Customer Value Added information with confidence
when making business decisions.
Implementation of the remaining six steps will have a solid foundation
if a high quality database is used for sampling and the fieldwork
is carried out to quality standards.
Watch the following newsletter for more information about the third
part of Step 5.0...
Susan Moore
Previous Step 5.0 (Part
One)...
Next Step
Customer Loyalty in Telecoms
Conference
My seminar in Rome on Telecom Customer Care Management for Optimum
Customer Loyalty was followed by the Vision in Business two day
conference on Customer Loyalty in Telecoms. Practitioners from AT&T
Unisource, BT, TeleDanmark, Omnitel Pronto Italia, Microsoft UK,
and other European companies presented a comprehensive range of
papers, including determining the value of customers to a business,
operating successful loyalty programmes, and the European Customer
Satisfaction. Colin Bates from Customer Value Management's European
Centre presented a paper providing proof that creating loyal customers
through superior customer service can be extremely profitable.
Many European companies are operating loyalty schemes that reward
their most valuable customers. Valerie Bennett from Microsoft UK
described how their Intune programme had made a real difference
both for Microsoft and for its customers. This scheme focuses on
delivering superior value to the customers that Microsoft has determined
are its most valuable customers.
Chris Wheeler from BT outlined how BT was using customer opinion
research to measure the value, product and service quality as well
as value delivered to customers. From the information Chris shared
with me it is clear that BT is moving along the path of using customer
value information to improve services delivered by their front line
staff.
Starting from a position of measuring the value of customers to
a business, Colin Bates from CVM, went on to prove that increasing
customer loyalty drives up profitability as long as expenditure
on service improvement is targeted in the right areas. Colin covered
the range of techniques used to value customers, showing how they
all essentially measure difference of the revenue generated by customers,
less the resources consumed by the customer, multiplied by the lifetime
of the relationship. The difficulty in implementing these measurements
is not getting the definition right, rather it is that most businesses
account for revenue by product and cost allocation by division.
The various ways of measuring the economic value of customers take
this information and pro rata revenue and costs across customers.
Colin's paper covered a case study where two companies both started
with 100 customers, each contributing Euro 1,000 per annum in profit.
Company A had a loyalty level of 80% losing 20% of its customers
during the year, while Company B with a loyalty level of 90% only
lost 10% of its customers.
In the Telecoms industry this problem is very real with growth for
mobile phone networks stagnating as customer losses grow to almost
equal new customer numbers in some markets.
Colin concluded by stressing that this situation could be turned
around by targeting improvement in customer loyalty.
Under New Management
This banner is often boldly stated when a restaurant or business
changes hands. The inference is that the old owner didn't know how
to run a restaurant so what ever the new owners do will be better.
I am always a little bit suspicious of these notices. If the old
owner was running the restaurant profitably for a number of years
then surely they knew how to run a good restaurant?
In the 16th century the painter Mariotto Albertinelli founded the
Osteria da Pennello in Florence, Italy. It seems that Mariotto preferred
cooking and good wines to painting so he established a restaurant.
The location was in the same building where Dante Alighieri had
lived a few hundred years before. It soon became popular with the
local residents.
In 1969 the restaurant management passed to Gino Brogi. Thirty years
later he still greets you at the door and shows you to your table.
Tonight I decide to have Tuscan bread and vegetable soup followed
by a Tagliatelli, and then Milan style veal scallops. And why not
a glass of Brunello to complement it?
The Pennello's guarantee is simple, "Thirty years of unchanged
management". It is a guarantee that provides good value for
customers.
Regards,
Rodger Gallagher
|
