SOCAP articles

The power of SOCAP is its opportunity for debate, observation, challenge and global contribution to consumer affairs. In this section with your help and that of our many associates you will hopefully find content that builds our strength of communication.

We welcome submissions, comment, reviews on papers and articles direct to the enquiries@socapineurope.com

SOCAPiE service leaders' opportunity to contribute to service excellence standards - SOCAPiE members invited to put their names forward as expert resource for British Service Standards

One of our members, the British Standards Institution (BSi), has always been interested in tapping into new sources of expertise and has invited SOCAP members in the UK to put their names forward to contribute to standards development in their areas of expertise. We invite any member interested to initially contact us (enquiries@socapineurope.com) and we will forward your name to the BSI.   more details...

Product safety and product recall - what you missed!

Our February 2009 networking event focused on Product Safety and Product Recall and was hosted by Graham Hardy at Boots on a beautiful sunny day in Nottingham. 

The group, mainly practitioners representing a variety of industries, were delighted to learn about the Boots experience and their Red Alert approach to managing this sensitive issue.  Claire Singlehurst spoke frankly about the need for a concerted cross functional approach when an issue arose so that an immediate, effective response could be made to customers.

Vince Shiers of the RQA Group spoke of the need for a robust and structured approach, proven by testing in advance of the recall, to ensure that action could be taken to limit the impact on the business.  It was particularly heartening to realise that most of the members in the room already adhere to a process similar to that recommended by RQA.

Jill Webb and Karen Masters of RSSL, the expert on scientific analytical analysis and product testing, entertained us with some amazing examples of product contaminants examined by the laboratories.   Their insights were instrumental in highlighting the depth to which such analysis can go as well as in recognising the value of analysis in assessing risk.  Such information is critical in decision making around when to recall a product and when to take other, more appropriate action.

An international flavour was given to our day by Philippe Lauth of Peugeot on an away day from Paris!  Their approach to product recall is underpinned by the European directive 2001/95/EC on general product safety.  Driven by Peugeot's commitment to quality and safety, their approach also takes account of commercial demands within the motor industry.  Consequently, product recalls demonstrate the manufacturer's initiative in taking preventative action to protect consumers.

The day ended with a tour of the Customer Contact Centre which everyone found fascinating, especially those members who run their own contact centres.  And of course everyone took away a goody bag courtesy of Boots!

We can't promise goody bags on future networking events but we can promise you a thought provoking day with other members so book now from our events calendar.

A new era dawns for SOCAP in Europe

Download this PDF article that was originally published in Customer Management magazine (July07)

Angie Court – Chair – SOCAP in Europe

Angie recently left Avis Europe Plc after 30 years in the car rental industry and for the past 10 years as Director of Customer Service for Avis EAMEA.

Her responsibilities included customer service delivery and recovery at the customer facing points, utilising the solicited and unsolicited customer voice collected about their Avis rent a car experiences.

We are all aware that it is how you make any person feel rather than just what is said, read or recorded in statistics, stays with them forever. To help improve any customer experience (or come to that, employees as well, but that is another story for another day), some of the secret, in my experience, have been found in that individual persons’ expectation.To begin with, some of the secret of that expectation is more to do with their own background and upbringing, which of course varies by their country of birth as well as their social environment. Overlay that with their personality traits, and then add huge impact received subliminally or otherwise by marketing promises, the customer has a perception of delivery in their mind that they carry with them.

When the customer meets the employee (who also has a perception experience depending on their own life story) can you guarantee that the two expectations of what is going to happen will be the same and therefore hopefully a successful story.

To know if their expectation has been met is found in their tone of voice, facial expression, between the written words and certainly hardly ever in the numbers. Does that mean that surveys are meaningless?

Certainly not, but number collection is not sufficient to help give the people who need to work on the customers view enough indication of what to do, put right, applaud and celebrate.

I found an impressive correlation of the customer views by collating the complaints and queries together with the survey collection in the same basket.

The subject matters for improvements can more easily be identified by having the two together. Ceilings of dissatisfaction are more specific, steep peaks found quickly in complaints which are often missed in rolling scores of survey results.

But for sure the key secret is the verbatim customer comments.  Here you really see how you made that customer feel.

By adding comment boxes along with the ‘tick out of 10’ asking very simply ‘what influenced your score?’ gives the insight needed to pin point corrective actions and drivers of scores.

Depending on if your organisation is international where your customers travel from one country to another, certainly for me our findings in Avis differed greatly by the country of residence and therefore expectation levels and service needs. What may be recorded 10 out of 10 by an American or even a British person is vastly different when recorded by an Italian for example where a 10 is rarely reported. As for recommending to a friend – well that’s another fascinating mix and certainly requires very specific training techniques to help identify the differences, which would take up more pages than this newsletter has allowed me. In short for today – those customer comments have the missing insight you need.

Collecting this information is useless unless it the relevant (emphasis on relevant to the different parts of the organisation) information is put back to the right place for the improvement to really happen. And then you need, in the words of Tom Peters – a fellow freak.

I was lucky in Avis because my career background in operations/fulfilment/training as well as the customer service (complaints) departments, so with all those years at the ‘coal face’ I instinctively knew the truth in what could really happen at those touch points rather than second guess what the customer was trying to say. I worked closely with Customer Champions (my fellow freaks) in those operating countries, who shared the same passion and had roles in the organisation which allowed them to influence their country organisation through customer delivery, recovery, training as well as the levels of management.Of course, it also helps to have a flat management structure to make changes quickly – and that’s another secret to tackle another day.