Servicing your brand

"The service I received was appalling, you told me I was a valued customer, but you have not treated me as such, please cancel my subscription."

"The product is not entirely as we expected, and it took three weeks to arrange delivery, very disappointing."

"Thank you, ordering was much easier than I thought, and the replacement arrived very quickly."

Three different, but very real, customer experiences, all of whom had problems, but just one of those three customers went on to re-order off-the-page and one has been lost in their entirety. So what went wrong, and what ought to have been done to manage customer service and customer expectation more effectively?

Brand values

Firstly, why do we make reader offers - what is the strategic goal? There are two lines to explore, the brand value and the product affinity. In choosing offers to make to customers, sometimes a little lateral thinking is required in order to reinforce or enhance perceived brand value. Publishers are having to respond to the challenges posed by the increasing pace of change in the marketplace, with the associated greater demands on readers' time and attention span.

Yet we continue to select products and services to offer our hard-won customers without due regard for the potential consequences. In trying to be different, choices are sometimes being made that compromise the long-term values of the brand. One magazine in 2003 cheerfully trumpeted a fabulous reader offer on page 139. When eventually located on p155, the 'offer' at a cost of nearly £200 did nothing to enhance the value of the magazine and left the reader feeling decidedly short-changed rather than the hoped-for warm glow emanating from a faux-fur throw.

Customer expectation

It pays to think carefully about brand values whilst assessing products and services to offer customers - do they match those values? Will the customer think added value by seeing the offer in the magazine, or will it detract from the core product? An offer for the sake of it leads nowhere but down a slippery slope to lower perceptions by an increasingly discerning customer base.

If a magazine is perceived as quality by the readership, then by definition co-branded or reader offers of goods and services must reflect that same quality or the brand is compromised - and customers have long memories. Many publishers do their homework up to first base, but do not include the fulfilment operation that is an integral part of the process.

To begin with, consider the delivery timescales. Is 'normally 28 days' from receipt of order really satisfactory in today's market? Online, next-day delivery is commonplace, with choices of delivery day and a range of P&P to match. Consumers now expect fast turnaround and high service quality - why should magazine readers buck that particular trend?

Next, determine the level of customer satisfaction you aim to provide. It is unlikely to be 100%, but unless brand values are to be compromised, the target should be in the low-90s with proper contingency to resolve complaints.

Inventory management is integral to customer service. How many are expected to be sold? How many are in stock? What is the lead-time for re-ordering if it sells well?

Consider packaging - no delivery service will provide guaranteed damage-free handling, but there is always a trade-off between state-of-the-art packing materials and cost.

What about order-handling? Even today, cut-out coupons still dominate, but dedicated phone lines are increasingly offered. However many lines are, or outside office hours turn into, answer machines for customers to leave their name and address. In an ideal world this would be sufficient - but not if the payment details turn out to be incorrect, or stock-out is reached. The vast majority of call-handlers are unable to provide payment verification, merely a check of the validity of the card number and expiry date.

Some of the better call-centres have a pseudo-stock check, counting down usage across the agents, and then advising customers of the out of stock position, but for the majority this is still non-standard, and for customers there is nothing worse than ordering, sitting back, and then receiving a letter of a delay "due to exceptional demand".

So your customer has ordered, the payment has gone through, and the product is in stock. What happens next? The order gets consolidated with other orders, and the warehouse receives a picking list. However, too many providers still operate on a once or twice a week batch-driven basis, further delaying the process.

As an example, suppose orders are received daily, but only collated every Wednesday, and get passed to the warehouse each Friday. The picking list is output by the following Friday and packed each Monday. In the extreme, an order taken on Thursday would be passed to the warehouse the following Friday and not packed until the Monday of the next week, twelve days later. Add on a five-day delivery span, and it's easy to see why companies still quote twenty eight days for delivery as a comfort blanket.

Delivery options

At the lightweight, lower-priced end of the parcel spectrum are Royal Mail and Reality White Arrow. Both of these businesses offer added-value options for next-day, two-day and in the case of Royal Mail, timed delivery against a standard window of between one and five days. Business Post follows close behind, then the more expensive courier companies such as Securicor and TNT. For heavier items two-man delivery services are available.

At first glance, the options for next day or two-day delivery offer opportunity to work with the customer to pinpoint a designated delivery day, but only if the packing and despatch can be planned and executed the requisite number of days before delivery is expected.

Where a non-designated delivery is concerned, problems often occur with recipients absent when delivery is attempted. Publishers often fail to consider adequate opportunity for the customer to rearrange delivery at a suitable time - particularly if it is a large item. Some companies only deliver in an area once each week, others make three attempts before returning the product to the warehouse often without the customer being aware that any delivery attempt was made.

Customer service

Too many call-centres are still failing clients and customers in key areas. Problems include those where limited resources, despite dedicated lines, results in low-activity clients receiving high levels of busy tone or are passed automatically to voice-mail, through to insufficiently developed systems that do not pop scripts or properly match orders to stock levels.

How many publishers have seen fulfilment problems lead to increases in letters of complaint to the editor rather than successful resolution by the suppliers supposedly paid to deal with those issues?

So what could publishers do better? Determine the service you want to provide your customers by paying due regard to their expectations as well as the cost. Failure to do so will cost in the long term, through increased erosion or reduced activity.

Joined-up fulfilment

Customers increasingly expect to be in control of the delivery process from the moment they place the order through to delivery. They expect that lead-time to be minimal, and the product and delivery service to be of a quality associated with the perceived value of the brand. They also expect a choice of delivery options with clarity on the differing service levels and costs that are available.

That sort of demand upon fulfilment systems is not delivered by a fragmented approach, but is manageable through a properly integrated process that does not necessarily need a single end-to-end supplier, but does require commonality of systems - sharing data to maintain a finger on the pulse for both customer and client.

Several fulfilment suppliers now offer integrated services, but some still fail to provide access for customers to make choices and track order progress on-line, or for clients to assimilate service level data.

Improvements in web data exchange protocols have led to the emergence of packages that can sit over individual supplier systems, feed orders into the process and receive inventory, despatch and delivery data from independent suppliers that can be accessed by customers to track progress, and by clients to evaluate overall service levels.

Even more importantly, the call-centre can also access the data, improving order handling by linking to live inventory levels, and having visibility of order progress, thus being able to advise customers in real-time of expected despatch and delivery dates, and accurately resolve queries and complaints first-time. The customer services team in possession of this level of information, which can be linked through the same systems to pop-up scripts, comes across as professional and has the time to sound friendly, extending the brand and its values over the telephone through that single point of contact for the customer.

This fully integrated approach also provides much greater clarity of process and cost management, enabling a proper balance of fulfilment activity based on customer expectation versus cost.

So what of our three disappointed customers? The one that continued to buy was a long-term customer, someone who had been inured over time to lower levels of service and was unfazed by lack of progress. The most vociferous was the new customer, enticed in by promises of a quality product that were let down by the reality of the service.

It's never too late to say sorry and offer an olive branch - even if you lose the customer the bad taste can be lessened - but in a properly integrated system the chances of both meeting customer expectation first-time every time and satisfactorily resolving problems that do occur are greatly increased. Thus that hard-won customer really does see added value in the relationship and comes back for more.