“Failure Demand” is the demand on your resources, or those of your organization, caused by a failure to do something right for the customer.
After the event, customers make further demands, unnecessarily consuming the organization’s resources because the service they received was ineffective.
The cost of these failures far outweigh the cost of “getting it right first time”.
The cost impact is not just the trade-off in effort between customer service and marketing, for example, but also in customer and revenue loss.
Ironically, customer loss is often referred to as “churn”, which has an unfortunate resonance with the story below.
John Sills wrote a great article based on his own experience entitled “Read My Mind (and Save a Fortune)”.
John describes raising a complaint of suspected food poisoning from a “culinary and gastronomic disaster” on a long haul flight.
He complained through the advertised channel, finding it surprisingly easy.
Maybe ill-advisedly, one of the default complaint options offered on the customer service portal was ‘I got food poisoning from the plane’! 😉
John then waited and waited.
A long time . . .
After 2 months, he resorted to Twitter/X.
He received an immediate reply with an effusive apology from the marketing team monitoring social media.
The apology explained that he had not been forgotten but “high volumes” of customer issues were the cause.
He also received the, now ubiquitous, NPS survey request to assess his delight with this interaction. ( You couldnt make this stuff up! 😉)
Further customer service effort, now delivered by the marketing social media team, was expended and John was offered a link to their internal ticketing system for customer complaints.
From initial complaint to an uninformative case status, there were numerous opportunities over TWO MONTHS to answer the one important question ‘when will I get a response to resolve this?’.
The failure to answer that question meant that John, along with other customers, had to take the initiative and get in touch again, and again, and again.
Clogging the customer service AND marketing channels, adding to this aforementioned “high volume” of requests.
All that’s needed is to answer the customer’s question before they ask it, to set expectations of what’s going to happen and when;
- When the customer first gets in touch, provide an estimate of how long it’s likely to take (with a link to the case management system, as appropriate)
- As the ETA gets closer, if the deadline is going to be missed, send an automated email explaining and setting a new expectation of timescale.
- Maybe provide effective self-service on the case management system, showing the timeline and progress of the complaint towards resolution.
Every business already knows what customers will want to know, they have the power to “read their minds”.
More time spent planning, predicting and answering in advance will help give customers a much better experience. And it’ll save the organization in cost, lost revenue and even “churn”.
You can read John’s stomach-turning experience, “Read My Mind (and Save a Fortune)”, here . . .
The final “irony of ironies” is that John Sills is also the author of “The Human Experience – How to make life better for your customers and make a more successful organization” – available at all good bookstores and here . . .
We need to get better at predicting, simplifying and reducing “Failure Demand”.
This creates yet another catalyst for streamlining and simplifying the customer experience in “end to end” processes and systems.
Thanks for reading . . . .
