Winning Your Customer through After Sales Service — A CX Standpoint
Part One: Role of Customer Experience in Answering Business Challenges
In recent years, companies have tried to manifest the “Customer Obsessed” mindset to their employees. They are focusing to answer their customer’s needs, fixing the customer’s pain points along their transaction journey, and even radically introducing new products and services to give their customers virtuous values and experience, thus defining new market standards. These initiatives are done not only to acquire new customers but also to retain the existing ones and turning them into a loyal customer. Those so-called loyal customers are the fifty billion merits for the company. Not only they can help the company to boost sales performance, but the presence of loyal customers can also reduce the company’s cost at the same time. A report from Invesp stated that the costs for retaining the existing customers are 500% cheaper than acquiring new ones.
“It Cost five times as much to attract new customers than to keep an existing one”
Along the journey to make those initiatives happen, the company needs a role to accommodate and ensure all the initiatives are correctly targeted, carefully planned, smoothly launched, and relentlessly evaluated, namely Customer Experience (CX). According to Gartner, CX is the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed their expectations, leading to greater customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. Based on the definition, one of the key responsibilities of the CX team within a company is to understand customers’ feedback and translate them into actionable insights that can answer all their needs. There are myriads of methods in gaining those feedbacks, but all of them follows the following framework: Ask, Analyze, and Act. The framework is a closed feedback loop as improvements are made and actions are taken.
It is important for any company to always look after what their consumers are saying. Those voices and feedback can become an impetus for their business to launch higher or even cause a hamartia leading to a tragic downfall once ignored or falsely interpreted. To deeply understand those voices and continuously improve and answer the customers’ needs are the things that make a good CX. Accenture reported that in the United States, poor CX can cost a company up to USD 1.6 billion. Also, it is reported elsewhere by Mckinsey that a good CX can leverage a company’s revenue by 10% to 15% while also cut cost from 15% to 20%. The data doesn’t tell lies. There are many success stories coming from a good CX practice. Take a look at Amazon that provides a seamless shopping experience. They listened to what their users need: speed. From that point, Amazon always tries to deliver faster, reduce friction in the shopping, and create a new environment where shopping can be fast and convenient. They even claimed as one of the top 10 brands in the US, according to Brand Relevance Index study published by Prophet, a Global Marketing Consultancy.
Some people may still think that impactful improvement can only be made and evaluated for every journey before the point of sale, although that doesn’t necessarily true for all occasions. People tend to forget that after-sales service matters. After-sales service encompasses all activities and processes that customers use after a product/service is sold. After-sales service is proven to be a key role in maintaining customer satisfaction and loyalty, according to Fazlzadeh et al. (2011). Their study revealed that after-sales service is a crucial factor to boost customer satisfaction as its presence affects the perceived value by the customer, and thus the quality of the relationship between buyers and sellers. It can also become a differentiator of one brand to another. A good CX must also keep an eye on this matter as customers journey with the brand doesn’t stop after they spend their money to purchase a product/service. The relationship continues after they purchase, and this relationship can become a deal breaker for a better (become a loyal customer and repurchase) or worse outcome (become a lapser, or even spread a negative impression via word of mouth or social media)
Part Two: Study Case
Several gauge or metrics can be developed and implemented to channel users’ voice to produce meaningful action, thus answering their needs. One common metric that is used by many CX practitioners is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS can be used to determine the internal and external factors that affect users loyalty. For the sake of giving a clear example, let’s assume that based on NPS study, it is inferred that brand preference highly affects users loyalty to choose online flight ticket service providers. Depending solely on this finding is not sufficient as more information is needed to tackle the main issue, that is to increase users’ loyalty. A good CX practice needs to gather more data and do fact checks to decipher the issue until its root cause, hence avoiding the vague or partial understanding of the issue that may lead to a false action plan formulation. As for the example aforementioned, a separate study is done to see the landscape of the competition in online flight ticket service providers and the triggers in choosing them. The study discovered that users are mainly a single brand user, meaning that they prefer only one channel to purchase their tickets. There are two main players within the landscape: Brand X and Brand Y, with Brand X being the main competition as the platform has higher purchase conversion compared to Brand Y.
By looking at the triggers of choosing Brand X, it is seen that platform easiness is the main reason to use the platform. Due to that reason, Brand X users claimed to be somewhat loyal to the brand, scoring at the top quarter of the index.
The term “easy” can be broadly interpreted and perceived (e.g.: easy to purchase, easy to access, easy to use, easy to schedule my booking, etc.), hence the term needs to be decoded for further analysis. In order to define the term, in-depth analysis is done for Brand X. The analysis is divided into two separate sections: before point of sale and after the point of sale.
Before Point of Sale
Looking at all touch points before the sale, it is seen that Brand X offers a simple flow in depart and return date selection. Moreover, the platform also provides more information, i.e. price estimation and best date. By having so, it is easy for users to select their designated departure and return date due to users are exposed with useful information for them to pick their dates while also equipped with a seamless flow. Such features trigger platform simplicity for users.
After Point of Sale
Looking at the service provided after point of sale, it is observed that Brand X provides a seemingly complete after-sales service. To name a few, Brand X provide seamless and simple online check-in feature and reschedule feature within the apps. By having so, users are pampered with such abundant feature in a single app, hence making them have the ability and flexibility to control their own schedule with ease. By examining how the feature works, it is also observed that users can access the feature easily. Both features are also equipped with sturdy product communication that is explained thoroughly on the platform’s website. The communication consists of the description of the features, how they work, and general T&C and FAQ. Several interviews are also done to random users to see how do they respond to such features. It is implied that they see both features as an improvement for their transaction experience, stating that both features are top-notch features. It also lands on the top 5 spots from the after-sales service list they see important.
Part Three: A Way Forward
Customers relationship with a brand, platform, or service provider doesn’t stop after they purchase the product/service, rather continue until they use it and give their feedback. Therefore, a good CX practice not only needs to understand how to unravel customers’ voices and feedback to produce sharp and vigorous insights but also how to entangle those voices and feedback in all touchpoints. To put it in thought, customers will always come back if they have a good experience with the brand, and it’s the foremost responsibility of a CX team to ensure their customers are having one, hence leveraging the brand to the apotheosis.
