If you are not visible to your clients, think again. Can you really afford to miss that one call?
The clear and unequivocal answer is ‘YES’ in capital letters. I can’t be more vocal than that. I am sure you would like to know the why behind my strong opinion. So here is the story.
I used to receive lots of unwanted calls; I am sure you can associate with that. Sales people, suppliers, advertising agencies and much more. It prompted me to remove my mobile phone number from my business card, something I had seen many founders/CEOs do.
I jumped onto the bandwagon and felt good about myself. I was free of the hassle of all those annoying calls interrupting my work. I wanted those in my organisation responsible, to deal with all inbound communication. The founders’ time should be used for more valuable work.
These were my contemplations that had prompted me to hide all my contact details. Make it tough for them to reach you, calls must go via the receptionist. The receptionist may only pass calls with prior announcement and clear subject, etc. These were just a few of the founder/CEO behaviours I had applied.
A while after, I was attending an executive course at Harvard Business School on driving sales and customer satisfaction. The opening question of the professor, to my surprise, was: “How many of you have their mobile numbers on their business cards?” My hand was a no-show. The room was kind of split as I recall. Then he continued, “Can you really afford to miss the one call that could be the biggest deal of your life? Can you really miss the one call from your biggest client being unhappy with something?”
I ordered a batch of new business cards while I was still abroad, naturally with my mobile number on them. I pushed my team to make sure they were on my desk and circulated before I returned. I went a step further, I made my phone and email public in all company communications. We created a welcome kit for our clients that would include my direct contact details. No protective measures, no gatekeeper. Anyone could now reach out to me. Anyone could find me.
Did it pay off? Did I receive again unwanted calls? The answer to both questions is, oh yes and how. I would nonetheless never move back to removing my numbers, one of the biggest mistakes I had done in my early career.
I could share dozens of stories with you on how it changed my business life, particularly when it comes to customer complaints. As space is limited, I picked one game-changing event to share with you. About two years back, I received a call from an unhappy client. It was a major client. He explained to me that post a service call by our team, the same printer we had fixed was repeatedly facing issues. He had reached the end of the line with us, lost his trust in our capabilities, and was about to part ways. The loss of this client alone would have been a loss in the hundreds of thousands.
He was justifiably very unhappy. Just imagine how unhappy we are when we pick up our car from service, and two days after it has issues. We need to take it back, and not only once but twice. Has it happened to you? It’s a very frustrating client experience. To top it, in that moment of frustration, you want to speak to someone who can resolve your issue, where you can vent your frustration.
After investigating the incident, I found out that our KPIs were tracking service calls, a four-hour response time, and 24 hours problem resolution, but not what really mattered to our client: did we fix the problem permanently!? How would we know if the technician done his job right? To track that, we introduced a no-call-back KPI on service jobs. We changed our KPIs accordingly and started measuring unwanted call-backs and incentivised our technical team for not receiving such call-backs for three months post-closing a job card.
Ever since, client retention has soared to around 92 percent with an NPS score ranking around 40. These are outstanding numbers. Had I not received the client call, the damage could have gone into millions on lost customer revenue, not on this one client alone, but with many different clients. I would have not come to know the problem and our KPIs would all be marked green.
Bottom line, if you are not visible to your clients, think again. Can you really afford to miss that one call?
About the author
Dr Sassan Dieter Khatib-Shahidi, founder & CEO of German Imaging Technologies (GIT)- EO UAE board member.