As consumers, we all tend to get pretty hacked-off when companies don’t give us the attention which we believe we are rightly entitled.
On a recent business trip, I was left sitting in an airport lounge waiting for an overdue flight to be called, not knowing what was happening, or if I was ever going to get home. There was much mumbling going on among disgruntled travellers about the airline not giving a damn about its passengers and simply being interested in profit.
When we did eventually board the aircraft, the pilot announced the reason for the delay. A passenger on the inbound flight had been taken ill with a suspected heart attack and the plane had diverted to a local airport so that he could get medical attention quickly. Suddenly, the mood changed. The airline was hero of the day; it had saved a life – how customer-focused was that?
Of course, the crime committed by the airline was not giving its passengers an update far earlier in the proceedings. Someone, somewhere, knew what was going on, but didn’t think to tell passengers what was happening.
Seeing life from the other side
Seeing life from your clients’ perspective can be an interesting exercise. If you have moved house recently and have experienced the trials and tribulations of dealing with estate agents who don’t appear that bothered about selling you a house, solicitors whose life objective seems to be to keep you in the dark and, dare I say, mortgage lenders who appear, on occasions, to be more interested in finding reasons not to lend you money, then you know what I mean.
However, it does us all good every now and again to experience our business in exactly the same way that our customers do. Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco, makes sure he spends time every week in a Tesco store, talking to staff and customers at the check out. If Sir Terry can make time to get out of his ivory tower, I’m sure us more humble souls in the mortgage industry can do likewise.
It is interesting to hear the way in which Leahy talks about Tesco’s approach, as it gives an insight into the reasons why the retailer has managed to achieve such phenomenal growth. Sir Terry says: “We never forget that we are shopkeepers. We buy and sell goods and services. We listen very carefully to what our customers want and we try our hardest to satisfy them better than our competitors do. We know that our customers choose to shop with us and they could change their minds at any time. That is why we strive so hard to get things right.”
Can all of us in the mortgage industry put our hands on our hearts and say that we have exactly the same approach to the way in which we do business? I suspect some can, but by no means all.
Maintaining customer focus
One of the issues for any business is that as it gets bigger it tends to become more remote from its customers. Maintaining customer focus becomes more difficult, because the individuals within a business who make key decisions, are not the people who implement those decisions and get the responses, good or bad, from customers. Ironically, having more staff does not necessarily solve this problem; it can simply add further distance between the customer and the decision-makers.
In this respect, small businesses are at a distinct advantage. Most small mortgage intermediary firms are owned by individuals who are out there, day-in, day-out, giving advice to clients. If clients are unhappy, they know about it immediately and don’t need to refer to the complaints register to establish if anyone is disgruntled. Small businesses also feel the impact of unhappy clients more quickly. Sales dip, income falls and profits are dented. This is the sort of immediate shock to the system that is guaranteed to make you sort out any problems.
As businesses get bigger, they don’t have to lose touch with their customers, as Tesco has proven only too well. Tesco, for example, holds regular ‘customer question time’ meetings in stores throughout the country. The feedback from these meetings goes straight back to the Board and decisions are made based on that valuable information, which does not get bogged down in layers of middle management. Last year, Tesco involved 9,000 customers in regional feedback meetings. Impressive, even for an organisation the size of Tesco. We operate a similar approach via a programme of regular intermediary forums, the feedback from which goes straight to our senior management and is used as a key point of reference is numerous areas of our work.
Monitoring client feedback
Although small businesses tend to have their fingers on the pulse of customer sentiment, they are also guilty on occasions of not monitoring customer feedback as closely as perhaps they should do. For example, when you have completed a mortgage deal for a customer, do you ask them for feedback, either verbally or in the form of a questionnaire, about the quality of service they received? If not, why not? You don’t have to do it yourself, you could task a member of staff with making that call after each deal completes. Not only will it provide you with invaluable customer feedback, but it also sends an important subliminal message to your customers which says ‘we care’.
Pass the feedback on to the product providers you deal with and, if the feedback reveals problems with their service, discuss with them what they are going to do to put it right.
The truth is that we all like and value excellent service. The problem is that, being typically British, when it all goes pear-shaped we tend not to vocalise our dissatisfaction but keep it to ourselves. We react by going elsewhere in future, rather than giving the company in question the chance to put matters right.
In the mortgage market, staying close to our customers is critically important. We don’t have any physical products; we sell a service and we therefore need to know if the service falls short of our customers expectations.
As that famous advert said: ‘It’s good to talk’
