Here’s an interesting article by Marc L. Songini that discusses the results of a recent survey, Consumers see little value in CRM:
Most consumers of high-tech products say that use of customer relationship management software by their vendors has not improved their service offerings — and in many cases, has made them worse, according to the results of a survey released this week by Accenture Ltd.
Accenture noted that such consumer dissatisfaction has a ripple effect on vendors — 73% of those surveyed said that merely “average” service would prompt them to consider evaluating products of other vendors.The consulting firm in March surveyed 1,200 technology consumers and 35 executives at high-tech companies about their experiences with automated service systems.
“This is a wake-up call that customer service should no longer be relegated to a mere instrument for extracting costs out of the business,” stated Brett Anderson, managing director for CRM at Accenture’s communications and high tech practice, in an announcement. “With so many technology products on a natural path to commoditization, technology companies need to use customer service to differentiate themselves from competitors.”
One of the more sobering statistics, Accenture said, was that 42% of the customers reported that they had to access CRM channels multiple times to resolve a problem, while 61% said automated service systems doesn’t speed resolution.
The survey also noted that 58% of customers using CRM systems believe that their customer service is average or below average, while 75% of vendor executives surveyed said they believed that automated systems are providing “above average” service to their customers.
About 77% of vendor executives said that self-service CRM systems have had a positive impact on their businesses. And 93% of those executives contended that CRM systems have speeded problem resolution, and 74% said the technology has directly led to higher customer satisfaction.
Meanwhile, only 13% of the customers said the ability to resolve their own problems with online CRM was a valuable capability for them, prompting Accenture to suggest that some vendors are wasting millions of dollars on such initiatives. “In sum, companies have a long way to go before their customer-service capabilities provide the experience customers seek,” it said.
Personally, in far too many business-to-consumer companies, I also don’t see CRM technology helping with customer service issues. For example:
- Interactive Voice Responses systems request account numbers etc. be entered, but I always get asked for this information again whenever a live person gets on the phone.
- Pressing 0 doesn’t help much any more. When I want to speak with a live person, many companies make me go through a lengthy process of selecting phone menu options before they give me the privilege of talking with a live agent.
- When I call on the phone, I don’t want to be told that I will get faster, better service if I go to their web site.
- When I finally get someone on the phone, the person often has to transfer me to one or more other people because different people in different departments are needed to address different requests – what happened to the notion that CRM systems and knowledgebases would allow a single person to do most of what anyone would need? Of course whenever I’m transferred from one person to another, I’ve got to start all over with my account number and explaining my problem.
- So many of the customer service people I end up speaking with are poorly trained and they have to keep putting me on hold while they look things up or talk to a more experienced person to get me an answer. Far too often, the customer service people are just plain rude.
- Resolution times for what seem to be routine issues just plain take too long. Why does it take hours sometimes to get what seem to be fairly straight forward issues resolved?
- And finally, I hate when a customer service agent who was not able to help and is going to transfer you someone else says “Is there anything else I could help you with today?” No thanks! Just keep me on my journey to total frustration and anger.
