Customer “Transactions”

A fairly big component of the work I am doing at the moment is focussed on improving the way our customers experience Telstra, right from the time before they are even considering our products, through to their post-purchase interactions with the company.

One of the biggest challenges I face is to step outside my everyday role as a Telstra employee and view the company from the eyes of a customer. I am sure that this is not only a problem I face, but one that a lot of people have when trying to improve the way customers interact with a company. We seem to get so caught up in “the way we do things”, or the processes we follow internally, and forget that to a customer none of that really matters.

One way to overcome this problem is to view each interaction with a customer as a ”transaction”. That is, when a customer deals with a company it is because they generally want to achieve a specific outcome. The role of the company in this “transaction” is to make it as easy as possible for the customer to achieve that outcome. The customer doesn’t generally care how the company does this internally, just that they get what they need from the interaction.

This model applies both in the typical notion of a transaction such as a purchase, as well as any other customer interaction, such as going online to search for product information, or calling a call-centre to report a fault. These can all be viewed as “transactions”.

This transaction-based view of the world is useful when trying to see things from a customers perspective. By always thinking “how would the customer want this transaction to occur?”, it is much easier to see where issues may arise and problems occur, rather than trying to shoehorn customers into already existing processes or methods that are internal to the company.

I should point out that the overall customer experience of a company is usually made up of many “transactions” with that company, and as such care must be taken to ensure the overall experience is an excellent one. However, breaking the experience down into its individual components can be a useful way to view things, as long as the customer’s end-to-end experience is a good one.

Focussing on improving the right metrics

“You cant improve something if you cant measure it”. You might have heard this saying before, and might have even acted on it. But before taking it to heart, you need to ask one more question “Is this something worth measuring and improving?”.

There are many examples in any number of industries where something that is taken as granted as being really important to measure and improve actually has very little impact on the bottom line.

A good example of this can be found when thinking about what is important to measure and improve in a call centre. A typical measure used in many call-centres is “Grade of Service”, or the the percentage of calls answered in a certain time, usually 20 seconds or similar. Whilst it is great to set a target for answering a certain number of calls in a given timeframe, a better measure for a call centre might actually be the abandoned call rate (the number of calls that are not answered at all as the caller hangs up), given that if a call is answered, even if its after 15 mins, as long as the query is handled well the customer will most probably go away satisfied.

A Twitter conversation yesterday (thanks @docbaty) gave me another good example, customer satisfaction. It is almost taken for granted in most industries that improving customer satisfaction will improve the bottom line of the company. However, a number of studies have shown that this may not be the case. Instead, measuring other factors, such as the number of customers who would act as advocates for your product or service, might be a better pointer to success.

I’ve only listed a couple of examples here that are top of mind, and I’m sure there are many more. Add your examples to the Comments…