About once a lifetime, I get sufficiently riled up to write a complaint letter. A couple of months ago I filled my quota for three lifetimes. I wrote to the president of a company-a more-than-casual acquaintance-and, in measured tones, recited the manifold indignities that his airline, on which I fly more than 100,000 miles a year, had heaped upon my person.
Why should it surprise me that I’m still waiting for an answer?
For many years I filled out those customer-comment cards in hotels and restaurants. And when I got to the line where they asked for a name and address, I always filled that part out, too. I never got any response, so I don’t really know why I did it. Maybe in the back of my mind I hoped someday to meet the person who actually reads these forms. Eventually, I did. He was an executive with one of the major hotel chains.
“What happens to those cards?” I asked.
“Oh, we only get about a 1 percent response,” he said.
He hadn’t really answered my question, but I plowed on anyway.
“Well, why don’t you conduct some kind of contest to increase your response rate? For example, have a drawing of all the people who send in cards and give the winner a trip to the Super Bowl. Then you’d really get some numbers on the board. I bet it would be closer to 5 percent.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” he said. “But then we’d have too many cards to read.”
Too many cards. In other words, too much customer feedback. We can’t have that, can we? Might clog up the old drainpipe. Disrupt the system. End of conversation.
The awful truth is that, while every company claims to listen to its customers-yes, yes, is simply dying to hear its customers’ every little thought-very few do.
For example, take those reader-response cards you find in business and trade publications, which offer more information about a company’s goods or services. Let me quote from an article in Architects Today, a newsletter put out by Architectural Record. The subject was Performark, a sales and marketing firm:
“In a five-year study, Performark researchers, pretending to be potential customers, mailed in thousands of reader response cards. . . . What happened? It took an average of 58 days for the requested pamphlets or brochures to arrive. Nearly one out of four inquiries were unanswered. Only one in eight generated a follow-up call by a sales representative, and those contacts came an average of 89 days after Performark’s initial indication of interest.”
Even when live sales leads come pouring in over the transom, when real customers say, “Come and get me,” what do we do? We provide minimal service. Or we ignore them entirely. We treat them as annoyances. What’s going on here?
It’s simple: We haven’t really gotten the message. All the downsizing, the merging, the layoffs of the last few years have been simply cosmetic surgery. Now it’s time to change the way we do business, not just the way we structure the business.
Are you responsive to your customers? Are you following up on sales leads in a timely, systematic, effective fashion? What kind of results are you getting?
Sophisticated tools designed to create leads or meet customer needs are useless without human follow-through. In fact, they’re counterproductive. We tend to be so dazzled by the yards of information we can generate that we regard knowledge as an end in itself and fail to put it to use. It requires a personal best effort undertaken by a living, breathing, thinking, feeling human being to close a sale or handle a complaint satisfactorily. There will never be a marketing tool that can do it for us. Follow up those leads promptly. Answer complaints superpromptly. Have a real person do it personally.
Mackay’s Moral: Less lip service, more customer service.
