Find Your Torch Points

Without a doubt, Customer Relationship Management – or CRM – has become a mainstay in current day business vernacular. Business professionals now talk effortlessly about touch points, customer experience, customer segmentation, and cross-channel integration. CRM has come a long way since its early days, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

Despite the maturing of this once nascent business capability, companies continue to struggle to consistently deliver seamless, effective, and meaningful customer interactions. It’s no wonder that customer satisfaction can be elusive for so many companies.

Although most companies will proudly tout their CRM capabilities, the true measure of success is customer satisfaction. The stakes are indeed high; in a competitive market, the ability to build and nurture customer satisfaction can make the difference between success and failure.

Too often, however, even the best of CRM intentions can miss the mark; promotions can miss the mark, cross-channel experiences can be inconsistent, and call center navigation can be inconvenient. When issues arise, they create a torch point; a defect in the CRM process that can leave the customer wanting or frustrated. The severity of each torch point can diminish customer satisfaction or lead to outright defection.

Finding the torch points in your business requires an unrelenting focus on quality, a heavy dose of process discipline, and an industrial strength measurement capability.

Consider the automotive industry; manufacturers were taught a costly lesson that defects and lower quality led to rapid erosion of customer satisfaction, brand perception, revenues, and profits. Automotive manufacturers responded by developing an unrelenting focus on quality; they managed process quality, measured every minute detail, and developed robust product testing capabilities.

In our automobile example, defects are easy to spot; when the car won’t start, the transmission fails, or the air conditioning goes out – it’s pretty obvious that there is a problem. In the CRM world, however, the torch points aren’t so readily evident. Businesses have to look closer to see where their customer relationship capabilities might be breaking down.

CRM torch points can occur in a variety of situations or interactions. Here are just a few examples that seem to occur too often in today’s business environment:

1. Account number fumble: When a customer contacts a call center they are asked to enter their multi-digit account number. Yet when they get transferred to a live customer service agent, they are asked for this information again.
2. Promotion defect: A consumer products manufacturer or retailer runs a promotion on Father’s Day weekend for 20% off a particular item. Some customers snap up the deal but forget to bring their coupon or specific promotion code. If and when the customer returns with the coupon to collect the 20% discount, the store won’t honor it since it is now past the promotion period, even if the customer has the receipt to prove the date of purchase.
3. Sorry, wrong channel: A customer visits a web site only to find that they can’t find the product they were looking for unless they visit the store. Conversely, they visit the retail store only to find out that they are out of stock and are directed to the web site to see if it’s available online.
4. No card, no benefit: Many businesses utilize the ever-popular loyalty card to dispense rewards or discounts. An extremely loyal customer drops into their preferred store without their loyalty card. Despite being an extremely loyal customer, the store refuses to dispense any rewards or discounts without the physical loyalty card.
5. Feel the pressure: Cross-selling and up-selling can be lucrative for many businesses, but applying pressure sales to get customers to buy more can often have a negative impact on the customer experience. A customer that is ready to complete their shopping experience is confronted with a pressure sales environment trying to get them to ‘buy more.’

These are just a few simple examples of torch points that can occur anywhere in the customer experience lifecycle. Even the best of CRM intentions can sometimes miss the mark; promotion policies can create buyer’s remorse, cross-channel experiences can be inconsistent, and call center navigation can be inconvenient. When CRM torch points arise they can leave the customer wanting, frustrated, and unsatisfied.

If your business smells CRM smoke, it might be time to put out the torch point fires.

Do you know where your CRM torch points might be?