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Customer expectations are shifting exponentially

Louis Vorster

Businesses deliver good service when they exceed customer expectations by focusing their efforts in three main areas: customer-friendly processes, employee commitment to customer service, and customer dialogue. This is according to Eberhard E. Scheuing in his book, Creating Customers for Life.  Businesses must excel in all three areas to achieve excellent customer service.

After collecting money from the customer’s bank account every month, for 20 years, a curious case of amnesia sometimes develops when it is the client’s turn to collect his/her money.

To be presented with a form that requires the customer to complete his/her name, surname, address and the very same bank details that have been used for 20 years, is not an example of a customer-friendly process.  

By contrast, some product providers offer real-time processing through transactional Internet services, transactional cellphone services and telephonic transactions, thereby setting new standards in customer service.

These real-time channels are shifting customer expectations exponentially.

The new levels of customer demand for immediate results are being transferred to intermediary practices, which in turn results in an increasing requirement for real-time access to product provider information.

Employee commitment

What we measure is what we get. Is excellent service part of the business’s culture or, even better, is it an expressed part of its values? Is customer service excellence measured? Is it rewarded? Is the lack of service delivery identified and addressed promptly? Are these principles visible and the measurements communicated on a regular basis?

If these can all be answered in the affirmative, employees and prospective employees are empowered to deliver personal service.

A lack of these basic requirements would result in pockets of individual employee excellence within a sea of service indifference.

Customer dialogue

A 2009 study by the Customer Contact Council reveals that while 96.7% of the 1 822 surveyed companies believe that customer feedback is very important for designing appropriate service solutions, 76.6% of the same group is not satisfied with its current insight into customer needs.

This clearly indicates that the vast majority of the businesses surveyed admit to delivering services that cannot be confirmed as being necessary for their customers.

Another finding of the same study is that although electronic self-service usage almost quadrupled over the past five years, calls to the call centres decreased by only 4.2%. This seems to support the finding that understanding customers’ needs is of paramount importance for the development of appropriate self-service technology.

Once again, what we measure is what we get. Do we know exactly what our customers expect? Do we accept that every customer is unique?

Who owns whom?

Does the client belong to the intermediary or to the product provider? If clients belong to both, who is the primary owner, who is the secondary owner, and what are their roles?

Although these are simple questions, the answers tend to vary significantly depending on who asks them, who answers them, and in which phase of the relationship they are being asked.  

Ideally, the intermediary, product provider and client seem to function optimally where a defined service partnership is struck.  This would entail that service processes and responsibilities are discussed and a clear understanding is reached to indicate when the client will deal with the product provider and when he/she should be referred to
the intermediary.

Unfortunately, many clients, intermediaries and product providers are not entirely clear on this relationship, even more so during the after-sales phase.

This often results in one party being referred to the other – creating a perception of issue avoidance or bad service – while the root cause is more a function of the undefined roles and expectations of the triad.

As a general rule, all parties will fulfil their roles perfectly if there are no continuous referrals, unless it is an essential part of the basic product design.

Should not the following question be considered critical to the process of service and product development: “What information should be provided to each of the parties to avoid the continuous need to clarify responsibilities that have not been allocated or defined?”

The fact is that by ‘traditional’ design, the product provider is less involved in the advice process and, similarly, the intermediary is less involved in the product administration process. If this entails that the customer can obtain quicker results if the product provider is contacted directly, it is only a matter of time before the imbalance impacts negatively on relationships between the various parties.

Service processes should be developed specifically to empower the full value chain. As the primary customer relationship undoubtedly vests with the intermediary, product providers respecting this relationship seem to create more appropriate value for intermediary businesses.

A simple example would be real-time electronic access for the intermediary to the actual communication between the product provider and the client.

Another example would be recognising the key role that intermediary administration personnel perform, by providing role-specific, customisable access to product provider information systems.

Complexity

Given the wide variety of roles in our industry such as intermediary, intermediary administrator, applicant, insured, co-insured, second owner, previous owner, cessionary, beneficiary, beneficiary of ownership, administrator, debit order payer, executor, employer among others, it is a complicated process to supply all parties with the information and transactions relevant to the roles they perform.

The information supply risks associated with these roles result in product providers applying different rules depending on the risk level they maintain. This often causes customer service challenges for intermediaries whose clients are placed at different product providers.

Information aggregation services such as Astute Financial Services Exchange achieved a great feat by navigating their way through these complexities in order to provide intermediaries with much needed information.

Changes in legislation governing access to customer information will no doubt bring changes to these services, however, we are also confident that the improved information security will benefit all parties involved.

The future

Product providers and intermediaries who are ahead of the curve in adjusting their service processes to provide for the fast-changing expectations of their shared customers, and who also actively manage service delivery, are best positioned to intermediate, re-intermediate and retain customers who wish to benefit from personal service and qualified advice.

Louis Vorster is head of Wealth Service at Momentum

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