The Empowered Customer: The Significance of Consumer Development to Customer Management

It is not surprising to us nowadays that customer loyalty has become an incredibly tenuous and fragile thing. Often when tracking down the contact methods of a company whose customer management or customer care department is on the poor side, the first search result you will find is a customer action forum, in which pages and pages of posts are being written, detailing numerous customers’ feelings of abandonment and frustration, and their correspondence is often more invective than praise.

Never before have customers had such up-to-date information about a company’s habits, and it’s also possible to say that never has the customer had to hand such an objective feel for the popularity of a service provider or brand. What’s more is that customers generally know the advantage of this; it is not dead knowledge, it is used to affect switches and to barter deals with the existing provider. Things move fast; the term empowered customer already seems like a crusty bit of nomenclature.

For a customer management team, this presents a huge problem, but also points towards the future way in which the customer will play an increasingly more integral part of the business strategy. The pain comes from trying to treat these empowered customers in the same way as was previously possible, ignoring this new widely-available knowledge that the consumer-base is privy to.

There are several ways to illustrate how customer management can be refined to cater to the new demands of the empowered customer. In areas such as call centre functions, monitoring and driving first call resolution ratios can be done by leveraging experience and talent from outsourcing vendors. For insurance companies and other areas where customer types vary significantly, customer management can see that hot leads can be patched through to veteran closers to clinch sales, giving customer satisfaction and ensuring that the most skilled personnel are being deployed where they are most useful. This example illustrates that the new demands of customer management are strategic, requiring only that the existence of the empowered customer be recognized.

In this sphere, customer empowerment demands employee empowerment. Even without a customer management outsourcing vendor stepping in to operate part of a company’s customer contact centres and functions, a quick browse of a customer action forum shows that customers are acutely aware of the rung of the hierarchical ladder at which they enter in a call, and shows a new consumer awareness of the mechanics of call centre operations. This means that to keep first call resolution levels (and therefore customer satisfaction levels) high, customer management requires training and encouragement of team initiative.

There is no easy way to address this fully, but as in all business scenarios the ability to meet the changing demands of customer bases will be the difference between staying competitive, and being the ship from which you watch your customer bases jump.