Keeping customers happy in hard times

Some executives think it's necessary to cope with challenging times by slashing customer service, and many of them did just that during the recession of 2008. They were clearly deluded, however, as e-commerce was making customer satisfaction even more important. Yet hard times call for creative solutions. How can companies maintain or improve their service levels while managing costs? A 2008 McKinsey article suggested that they should rigorously test their ideas about what makes customers
satisfied. In doing so, many find that their long-held ideas are simply wrong.

Consider time-to-answer, a metric used to calculate employment in call centers. Unfortunately, a 10 percent improvement requires much more than a 10 percent increase in staff. Some companies have carefully measured their customers' attitudes on this subject. A wireless telecom provider found that answering phones immediately produced delight among customers and that leaving them on hold for a specific number of seconds—the patience threshold—produced strong dissatisfaction. Customers didn't care about times in between these poles. The company relaxed its service levels but carefully avoided crossing the patience threshold. Customer satisfaction dropped negligibly, but the significant savings in staff costs were reinvested to raise it by making problems easier to resolve.

This isn't an isolated example. Read our classic article "Maintaining the customer experience."

— Roger Draper, editor, New York

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