County Carpet Cleaners

If you follow my tweets or link to me on LinkedIn you might have picked up that I am teaching the CRM Topic on an MBA course. As part of this I have been developing the teaching material and case studies, this of course means that I am currently very sensitive to CRM and customer service approaches and issues. So when I was called by County Carpet Cleaners, while I was putting together the customer service module it was manna from heaven.

Out of the blue, I had a cold call. This is pretty much how the conversation went.

“CCC are a small company based in Dorset. They are looking to extend their service towards Basingstoke and want to gain new customers in the area. Satisfied customers tell other customers and that way the business grows. Would I be interested in having two of my carpets cleaned for a special deal of £9.99?” I am a small company myself, I work with lots of small companies and I feel it’s usually a good policy to give them a break. Besides he had come clean (pardon the pun) about why he had called. Notwithstanding I have three teenage children who have yet to discover wiping their feet and light coloured carpets, so yes I would like the carpets cleaned. I asked about the method they used which seemed ok for the carpets we have so I asked “How much would you charge to do more than two carpets?” The caller answered this by saying that the technician would give me a quote on the day. This seemed a bit evasive, maybe they were considered to be expensive, but I could always say no or try and negotiate on the day.

We agreed a date a day or so ahead and he promised to put his details and a confirmation in the post that evening. At his insistence I took his number to call if there were any problems. Organising this gave me some brownie points with “she who must be obeyed” so I felt happy about taking a cold call.

The day arrived; I cleared the rooms, vacuumed and awaited the knock on the door, we had agreed that they would arrive between 11am and 1pm. My office is a few feet from the font door, so I can usually hear knocks, taps and shuffles on the door step.

Time passed and at 1pm, a little irritated that I had waited in for nothing, I called to ask where the cleaner was. The different person, who answered, said that she didn’t know but would call her manager to find out and get back to me. No confirmation letter had arrived so it may have been that I had mistaken the day or misheard the time or any one of a dozen reasons any one of which could have been fixed with a 30 second phone call.

A happy customer tells 5 people about the good experience. An unhappy customer tells 17 other people about the poor experience. An unhappy customer who has been promptly and efficiently put right tells 35 people about how the company retrieved the situation.

The day ended without a return call from CCC or my carpets being cleaned. I was a bit miffed about the way they had behaved. To top it all, “she who must be obeyed” was disappointed to find the floor still grubby. However, even then it wasn’t irretrievable. A prompt call with an apology would have swung it for me, an offer of more carpets for £9.99 would have had me singing their praises, so long as the service was good on the day.

THREE WORKING DAYS AND A WEEKEND LATER! I had a call from, what sounded like a young schoolgirl. “She had a note that no-one had been in when the technician had called and would I like to reschedule?”

I mentioned that I had been in all day and that I was a little irritated that I had wasted a day waiting for them. I mentioned that I had called on the day and not had a reply till now. Silence: and no apology. I suggested that the service they were promising as a new customer wasn’t that good and how would she feel if a company had behaved like that to her? Again no apology, she simply said, “oh ok we’ll leave it then, and hung up.”

Jan Carlzon suggested a process analysis technique called moments of truth (Moments of Truth by Jan Carlzon (Harper Collins 1989)) about SAS Airlines, his ideas were further developed in another book “Service America!” by Albrect and Zemke (Harper and Row 1987). The technique attempts to define the boundary between back office and customer facing activities, and diagnoses  the moment in time when a customer comes into contact with the products, systems, people or procedures of an organisation and as a result leads the customer to make a judgement about the quality of that organisations products or service.

Carlzon’s message was that back office processes can be less than perfect so long as everything that impacts customer is well managed. My initial contact with CCC, was mostly fine. From then on the rest of the interaction was a disaster. No customer history, or record of my call, poor service on the day. The technician could have been given my telephone number to see where I was and presumably had a mobile phone. No follow up, no apology and no attempt to remedy the situation.

I still have grubby carpets, however I do have a case study that I will be presenting to my 100 odd MBA students, who I expect will have carpets at some point in the future, and a solid idea of how a carpet cleaning company should aim to acquire, satisfy and retain new customers.

The cost of acquiring me as a new customer was probably less than £1.00, 1/1000 of a 300 business phone list and a 5 minute phone call. We usually have our carpets cleaned annually at a cost of about £100. So even on a short customer lifecycle my monetary value to CCC would have been at least £500, plus the value of any recommendations I make to others.

The lost opportunity cost to CCC is therefore huge. Even using the simple metrics in the quote I mentioned above CCC have lost in excess of £8,500 not taking into account my 100 students or the readers of this blog.

CCC, let me take you through the steps of good customer service.

1. Follow through on your promises. Where is my confirmation letter.
2. Your technician should have had all my details. Ideally he would have phoned ahead to say he was on his way, and left me a card to say I missed him and how to contact him.
3. Record all your customer interactions so that all your operatives know what is going on. The lady who answered my call should have passed my enquiry to someone who could manage it immediately.
4. Recognise that good customer service is time critical. 3 working days is too long to follow up a complaint.
5. The girl doing the follow up needs to be trained. She should have apologised and asked me what she needed to do to remedy the situation. After all she is representing your business.

If you run a small business, and don’t want to end up a case study, look at some of the ideas I’ve presented above and see how they can be applied to your business.