Acme Online Distribution has been in business since 2002 and has grown their sales to over $2 million annually. The company carries over 3,000 different office product items from a wide variety of manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors. Very recently a major Internet shopping platform notified Acme that they were going to suspend selling privileges due to customer complaints. This notification meant that almost 30% of Acme's sales were going to disappear due to the suspension.
The Problem
The major Internet shopping platform has very stringent guidelines with regards to the allowable number of customer complaints compared to positive reviews. Acme was accumulating too many online complaints as compared to positive reviews.
The typical complaints registered by the customers were:
"I contacted Acme and told them that I had received the wrong product. Acme's response to the problem was very slow and they made me pay to ship the incorrect product back to them."
"Acme never responded to my emails and phone calls. Customer service is non-existent with Acme."
"I finally received my product after trying to contact Acme and waiting over two weeks. I consistently contacted Acme asking about the shipping status and never received a response. I had already contacted my credit card company to cancel the charge on my credit card."
In summary, Acme was not meeting the expectations of their customers. Most Internet shopping customers have placed orders in a variety of places and have definite expectations with regards to what is good customer service. Acme was shipping the wrong products and generally not responding to customer issues on a timely basis.
An internal review of Acme's operation seemingly showed a different picture. Over 150 orders were processed every day and most of the orders were shipped the same day that they were received. However, Acme did not have a set of procedures in place to handle the exceptions to the rule. Customer issues were logged into Acme's accounting system into a "comments" field with the customer record. Unfortunately, the accounting system did not have the ability to notify anyone when the problem was left unsolved.
The Solution
Acme decided to implement a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution to manage all customer communications, including customer complaints. The system automatically retrieves sales orders from the accounting system several times a day. When an order is marked as shipped, the order tracking information is automatically updated in both the accounting and CRM systems. Customers receive an instant email notification about the status of their order shipment when the information is updated.
Any customer issue that requires research and subsequent follow up is entered as a "Customer Ticket" into a support management feature of the CRM solution. Each ticket is assigned to a specific person for follow up and the assigned to person has a list on their personal dashboard showing open tickets. After a ticket sits in the system for four hours without a response, an email is automatically sent to a supervisor showing that the ticket is still not resolved. Customers are automatically notified via email whenever the status of their ticket is changed and the customer can view the ticket online.
After the new solution was implemented, Acme contacted the Internet shopping platform and briefed them on what had been done to resolve the issues that were occurring. The Internet shopping platform lifted the suspension on Acme's selling privileges. The number of negative customer reviews were replaced with positive reviews.
Summary
Managing customer communication is a very important element of any business. Many Customers want to be able to reach some one on the telephone when they have a problem. Other Customers are comfortable with email communication or an online ticket system to report issues. In all cases, the Customer is looking for a proactive response to their problem.
The Customer may not always "be right", but you have to quickly take care of their problems to avoid the consequences of a negative shopping experience.
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