Buy something online or in a store, it’s a transaction.  Call a customer support center, it’s a transaction.  Companies take orders, deliver, track, evaluate, measure, and react at the transactional level.
Companies that reduce or restrict communication and interaction with their customers, in the rush to cut costs and increase efficiencies, are risking their one most important asset – their customers.  Even the best intentioned companies struggle with how to shield their customers from the transactional machine behind everything a company does.

What Can Your Company Do?

Here are some tips to help you avoid the customer “transaction trap”:

• Hire the Right Employees to Interact with Customers:  It sounds simplistic.  Hire people who have a natural curiosity and interest in others.  To do so, interview candidates on how they relate and interact with people.
• Train Employees:  Interactions with customers should be a primary training element. It is important to put customers at the top of the training objectives list.  Include role playing some common interactions and what your expectations are of employee interaction with customers.
• Establish the Right Company Metrics:  We could write a “War and Peace” sized novel on this topic.  Metrics should be determined from the customer’s perspective.  Is speed and economy important to your customer?  Most likely the answer is “yes”.  However, determine what else is important to your customer. Think through their expectations of an experience with your company and what will keep them coming back. In most cases, it’s that they feel engaged with your company, your employees, products, services, ambience, values, etc., and that they feel valued and appreciated.
• Reward the Right Behaviors:  Once you have the right metrics in place, ensure those metrics are bringing about the right company and employee behaviors. For example, Ritz Carlton “shares ‘wow stories’ at meetings each week that relay guests’ tales of staff members going above and beyond the call of duty.  Each ‘wow’ winner, such as a laundry attendant who dove into a dumpster to retrieve one young guest’s stuffed gingerbread man, gets $100”. (BusinessWeek, March 3, 2008.)
• Experience Your Company as a Customer: Call your company’s main number, call your customer service number, and order one of your products or services.  How easy was it?  What didn’t go well?  How did other employees interact with you when they thought you were a customer? What were you expecting?  What do you think your customers would expect?
• Be Mindful of Every Detail: Look for and apply ways to shield your customer from the transactional aspects of your company.  A recent example we encountered was a company that uses one product number when they sell to a customer and a different product number when they call to set up installation of the product in the customer’s home.  This level of complexity and evidence of a siloed approach (sales uses one number, service uses another) should not be visible to the customer.

BusinessWeek’s second annual ranking of Customer Service Champs summed up companies who make the list:  “know how to keep employees happy, make tech investments that help rather than hinder consumers, and elevate leaders who make service their mantra.”  (Source: BusinessWeek Special Report, March 3, 2008.

Craft a Customer Interaction

Even when a company addresses their often siloed and disconnected view of customers, the next challenge is how to consistently build a relationship with customers by interacting and providing value over time. Companies that excel at moving past the transactional level with their customers do so by deliberately crafting customer interactions in a way that builds a relationship.
For example, a large part of our consulting services concentrate on enabling our clients to:

1. move from a  transactional focus that is only on products and services, with limited or harmful customer touch-points,
2. move to a consultative focus that provides value on top of products and services, delivering a consistent and deliberate customer experience with proactive customer touch-points,  and/or
3. move to a strategic focus that intensifies the relationship between customer and provider: doing parts of a customer’s business for them (i.e., outsourcing), co-developing solutions, or leveraging each other’s customers and channels, etc.

Take a holistic look at your company.  Is the customer at the forefront of how you run your business or are they left out of your company priorities?  Even in the best companies, business goals and metrics can continually hold the customer at the transactional level.  Moving from the transactional takes thoughtful and deliberate action across all parts of your company.

By Sue Morgan
Senior Consultant for Beyond Philosophy