The art of Customer Love

Listen up...

I recently read the book Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, and he believes much of the success of his $1billion online retail business comes from it’s commitment to the culture of the business – which allows every person in the business to stay customer focussed. He talks about customer happiness with religious zeal.

The culture of the business means that there is not a department accountable for customer care – the whole company is. Every employee has at least 2 weeks on the phone with customers as part of their induction training. No matter what role they have joined the business for, being with customers if everyone’s job.

At one point in the book Hsieh poses the question ‘As leaders are we asking the right questions?’. As RedBalloon’s CEO I asked myself – how do we know what are the right questions?

Recently RedBalloon for Corporate wanted to find out – not just if RedBalloon was delivering on its promise (ie customer satisfaction), but we wanted to gain real insights to assist us ask the ‘right questions’ and determine future activities. We know to be successful we must listen and be truly transparent with our customers – acknowledge our commitment to customers – but also appreciate that sometimes things can go awry.

If we are not asking the right questions – and listening to customers, more often than not, we also won’t even know if things get out of kilter. Establishing listening posts with customers is also a great source of innovation and development of how we can grow and better support our corporate clients.

Matt Geraghty, Head of Corporate, explains “in order to maximise our reach  we carried out an anonymous online survey which generated 183 responses and combined that with an independent phone survey performed by Customer Return who contacted 300 existing clients which helped to ensure customers felt the ability to be completely honest.”

So what did we learn?

• 94% of our customers said that we were friendly, knowledgeable and professional. This is a great result, however whilst no one said we were extremely bad at these things, what is it that the 6% of people who are ‘on the fence ‘were expecting? How could we either better manage expectations or create a better approach for them? RedBalloon has close to 2,000 corporate customers so a short fall of – 6% represents – 120 people – which is a lot of clients who we are not serving the way they want us to.
• 94% of people also rated the experience suppliers approach in the same way. This gives us an opportunity to drill down more into what people expected and how we could make that smoother for them.
• We discovered that only 5% don’t know the impact that the RedBalloon for Corporate has on their business – whilst 91% claimed that RedBalloon was successful or very successful in achieving the business objective of using us. Great stuff!

Satisfaction is a subjective term – and depends on an individual’s perception… so what we wanted to discover was whether our customer talked about us to others and are strong supporters of what we do. I was delighted to see that 91% of people are ‘advocates’ and tell others about us, with 92% being ‘promoters’ having recommended us to others. This of course support the theory that word of mouth is the best marketing strategy of all, and it is definitely one of the number one ways our Corporate team generates new business. Like we say, Happy People = Happy Customers = Happy Profits.

Nathan Williams, Managing Director of Customer Return, said "in an environment where the majority of businesses talk about providing a good customer experience, and then often fail to measure, let alone substantiate these claims, it's refreshing to see RedBalloon proving the value of the positive customer experience they provide. RedBalloon's commitment to seek independent advice on asking the right questions of their customers, to track the results of the process, and to then validate their customers further by using this feedback to improve their business, is proof of their commitment to their customers.”

As RedBalloon progresses its customer excellence program – this is the first time we have surveyed our corporate customers. Thank you so much to the hundreds of people who took the time to help us listen.

We appreciate it – and look forward to delivering. (…like our brand new website and online rewards platform just launched!)

Date: 16/08/2010

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