A couple of years ago, I was speaking at a conference in Dubai on the topic of failure, fumbles, and fiascos in customer experience.
One of the central themes of my talk was that more often than not, we design customer experiences that cater to the majority of cases.
However, sometimes things go wrong due to poor assumptions, a lack of due care and attention, or an over-adherence to process and rules rather than common sense, and, in turn, they can generate, at a minimum, lots of complaints.
Many companies are not very good at handling complaints. But the ones that do, see them as an opportunity to learn and make things better for their customers.
The Leader Who Starts Every Day with Complaints
This idea came to mind recently when I was chatting with Keith Farley, Senior Vice President of Individual Voluntary Benefits at Aflac, a leading provider of supplemental insurance policies for both individuals and groups that help cover expenses that major medical insurance policies may not cover.
In our conversation, Farley told me that he starts every workday by reading customer complaints.
He does this, he says, because he knows that with 50 million policyholders worldwide, complaints happen, but also to better understand "what our service failures are," and where changes need to be made.
To balance things out, he says he also tries, on Friday afternoons, to read "the happy notes that customers send," thus allowing him to go into the weekend with what we did well this week.
In addition, he says that he regularly listens to customer calls because he says, "you really just get to hear in a very raw way exactly what people are thinking and saying. That kind of feedback is gold.
"You can have all the surveys and all the quantitative stuff, but the qualitative stuff is where you can hear the emotion and really understand what people are thinking."
On hearing this, I suggested that, in my experience, there are three levels of leadership in this regard:
- The first level involves leaders using data to guide their decision-making.
- The second level adds customer stories to the mix, helping them emotionally connect with customer feedback and accelerating their response.
- The third level of leadership occurs when leaders experience failure, either directly or through reading complaints, listening to calls, talking to customers, or actually helping them in real time. This makes their experience very real and compels them to take action.
The 15-Cent Lesson Behind a Career in Customer Experience
He agrees and says that he learned very early in his career when he was a young field marketer at DeWalt over 20 years ago selling circular saws.
Now, back then, circular saws normally came with an eight-foot power cord as standard.
However, if you were cutting a four-by-eight sheet of plywood, either diagonally or lengthwise, you'll end up hitting the plug as you finish. This could disrupt your cut and result in a funny angle.
Now, if you had an extension cord, then you would avoid that situation, but they listened to customer feedback, and as a product development team, they decided to make it so that their cutting tools came with a 10-foot cord as standard to help customers avoid those situations.
The cost to extend the cord by two feet: 15 cents. The impact on the customer: massive.