A new measurement tool has recently hit the global services market and Marketing and Operations teams are wondering how they ever worked without it.
“It’s like cell-phones in the 90’s,” says Jake Orpen, Managing Director of Conexus. “Before 1992 we didn’t know that we had a need for telecommunications mobility, now our businesses can’t survive without mobile phones.”
One of the challenges that Service Marketers currently have is getting the organisation to deliver on its brand promise – linking the customer’s experience to the brand’s fabric and values. One of the reasons they don’t succeed is poor measurement systems. And, as the old saying goes, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
Yes, you’ve tried the customer feedback card and the feedback box - now in the corner of reception behind the pot plant. You’ve tried the key-pad and SMS technology that no-one gets excited about (including customers).
These systems have six fundamental weaknesses: • They rely on the customer to take the initiative. • You will hear from customers who are either delighted or angry. • The sample is too low. • Your operational staff have ample opportunity to tamper with the feedback by removing complaints, adding in compliments, etc. • The reports you receive are a month old. It’s too late to stop your customer from using his blog site, complaint portals and his 10 closest friends to spread his view of how poor Brand X is. • There is no opportunity to capture and relay customers’ ideas, suggestions and comments from to the correct person or outlet.
Surely these are worth gold?
Tactix is a revolutionary new measurement system for customer feedback that delivers on time. Tactix is able to receive/import customer transaction data from yesterday’s service/sales event and then display these in an ordered way to a group of call centre agents who follow up with customers. Customers are asked whether they were happy with the service received. (Imagine getting a call on behalf of your insurance company 24 hours after a claim to check whether you feel you are getting the attention you need? ...and then again three weeks later?)
Tactix was born and launched in South Africa and now has variants used all over the world, including over 1000 outlets in the USA. Huge interest has also been shown from emerging markets such as China, Brazil and Russia where economic growth is spurring competition especially in services markets.
Because Tactix is web-based there are no investments in hardware and software; reports are available anywhere where you get an Internet connection; projects can be deployed outside of South Africa and version upgrades can happen seamlessly.
Additional features include:
• Real-time reporting: Now you can see how your customers feel about you the very next day and deal with customer complaints before they become defectors. • Multilanguage capability: you can have, for example, the same questions executed in Portuguese in Angola; French in Rwanda; and Swahili in Kenya but the Indexed reporting in English • Trend reporting: you can select to see how customers feel about a particular issue; a particular outlet; an individual service advisor over any period of time (daily; weekly; monthly; annually etc). Imagine having a tool that can help with performance evaluation of service staff (satisfaction scores per advisor). • Hierarchical reporting: you select to see how an individual outlet or dealership is performing; or how a group / region is performing; or how the entire network of Franchises is doing at an overall indexed level. • Real-time complaint management: Any issue which a customer feels needs escalation can be done immediately and the service provider can be notified via email within 1 minute, the complaint can then be tracked to resolution. • Report dash-board & push reporting: Executives are busy, they need to be able to see at a glance how customers are rating the business. Tactix also pushes a simple email report to desk of management staff ready to be viewed as the first thing each morning. • Consent Marketing: Are you worried about the new legislation forcing you to get consent from customers to communicate with then in the future. Why not implement a tag-on question via Tactix and centralise your customer permission database?
Handy? We think so, and more than 300 customers agree.
For more information contact Jake Orpen at or 011 275 7000.
