How do you increase your return rates while increasing customer satisfaction? Visibility into the entire process is paramount. Often times the main driver for success rates is an increased return rate, which is then assumed to increase the level of customer satisfaction; the rule being the higher the success rates, the better the service being providing to customers. While everyone should be pushing for higher rates of success, in order to have true 360-degree visibility into your processes, you must focus on the small percentage that is unsuccessful.
Drilling down into the reasons why we are not successful in getting a customer to return a part and sharing that experience with your team can expose problematic areas in your company’s process. Being able to pinpoint exact reasons for non-successes will enable you to adjust your process to better serve the customer’s needs and enable even higher rates of return.
Every meeting should start with sharing and highlighting the successes and then the real meat and potatoes should be focused on “escalation management”. Focusing on how to handle records that are not successful and giving your team insight and advice on what to do with these escalations will give your team their own means to improve their process from within. This will not only add value to your program in the eyes of a customer, it will improve return rates as well as open up more opportunities for business and in turn improve overall customer satisfaction.
Focusing on the success rates as well as adding value by establishing a process for handling escalations and pinpointing exact reasons for not getting a successful result will allow true 360 degree visibility into your program, and help provide continuous improvement in financial outcomes as well as customer satisfaction levels.
–Tilson Bennett
