Profiles in Customers: Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home Business
I recently had a conversation with Jim, a prospective customer with an all-too common problem: As a specialist in a small (under 12 employee) niche home improvement business he is so successful that he is on the pathway to failure. There is extraordinary demand for his company’s services and job orders are backed up. Jim himself is booked months in advance. The company’s reputation for excellent work precedes them, drives new business, and is reflected in user ratings and reviews. The company is also increasingly earning a bad rep for poor communication with its customers as many recent reviews cite poor customer service and lack of follow up as sources of dissatisfaction. With new competitors entering the market, and a trickle of recent cancellations unheard of in the past, it’s time for some self-reflection. In Jim’s own words:
“I used to be able to count on a receptionist to handle the bulk of our outbound calls to customers, to schedule the field guys to do quotes, and to maintain communication when things change, when supplies go on back order, all of that. During and especially after the pandemic, we’ve cycled through a few receptionists with some long gaps in between. As this keeps happening, we need to look beyond hoping we find the right person this time and doing patch work ourselves until we fill the rec again. While we do need a permanent receptionist, what we really need is to change how we communicate with our customers.”
Jim is no stranger to workflow management software and already saw the value in Navgar for ad hoc task management and collaborative Flows. He was open and intrigued by the idea of additionally leveraging Navgar for some automated communications with his customers. He had some concerns:
Visibility and Control: “People using the tool will want to know what the message is that is being sent and that they determine when that email fires off to their customer.”
Ease of use: “Some of these guys, if there’s one extra click getting in the way, they will find an excuse not to use it.”
Jim was adamant that they didn’t sound “canned” or inauthentic - “Our brand is to not sound like we have a brand”
The points Jim made are foundational to Navgar and to Customer Service, in a broad sense. Poor service is rarely deliberate, the problems are usually masked by something else. There is an important needle to thread between leveraging information and technology for self-service and simply deflecting for cost savings. It gets complicated when there are multiple silos in the chain and roles become ambiguous, particularly with regard to who interfaces with the customer. Navgar allows you to define the important roles in the workflow, make them operational and communicate directly with the customer at the right touch points. Jim and I spent the next thirty minutes creating and customizing a Flow in Navgar as a proof of concept, with the normal pre-work activities associated with a single customer job joined with template emails to the customer at expected touchpoints. We established checkpoints in the Flow to maximize his crew’s sense of control of the message. Where he needed to communicate personally with the customer, it was a step in the Flow to complete. When we were done setting up the Flow, Jim launched a test instance. After completing a couple of tasks and seeing his email message delivered as intended, he smiled and said “Looks like we have a winner.”
