Here’s a quiz. Name the company referred to in the quotation below.

“First and foremost, DELETED follows a strategy built around the customer — not around price, process, brand, technology, or any other corporate tactic or buzzword you can think of. When the company considers how it can improve service and results, it asks itself one question: ‘What would the customer want?’”

What is the corporate name that first comes to mind?

Rogers Communications?

Of course it does not. Rogers has been a consistently low performer in this regard, leaving customers to murderously obsess about the customer service in phone, cable, Internet, et cetera.

The word “obsess” has been used purposely here. At his coming out party this week (the annual meeting), Rogers CEO Joe Natale announced that team success can be won only if employees “obsess over the customer experience.”

An interesting choice of words for a chief executive officer. To obsess. To preoccupy. To haunt. To fill the mind continually.

Clearly this has not been the case at the company that Ted built. Consider the 2016 J.D. Power Canadian wireless customer care study. Top of the pack: Koodo Mobile, rated “among the best.” In fourth spot, Telus Mobility, rated “better than most.” Tied for last place, in a ranking labelled “the rest,” are Rogers Wireless and Bell Mobility. The study was based on responses from more than 5,500 wireless customers.

Those comparators have been chosen with purpose here too, because Natale spent more than a decade at Telus as chief commercial officer before he became that company’s CEO. There are many distinguishing features between Telus and Rogers. Here’s one: Telus has a branded personality (meerkats, hippos, chameleons colour-shifting from green to purple). Rogers does not.

Koodo is Telus’s flanker brand, intended to woo a different consumer than the parent brand. Rogers has Fido.

Granted, Rogers is in an industry that excels in poor CRM — customer relationship management. Look at Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, et cetera. U.S. customers consistently rank those companies top of the pile in lousy customer service.

Natale’s promise doesn’t merely address corporate demeanour. Companies have to wake up to the strategic imperative of getting better at customer care. That J.D. Power report found that millennials contact customer care twice as often as baby boomers, and do so with the expectation that problem resolution will be efficient and swift. The obvious conclusion: satisfaction influences customer loyalty.

And the ultimate for the service providers is satisfaction across multiple platforms, which explains why Rogers came in for grief when it launched its Rogers First Rewards program in 2013. Existing Rogers customers enjoying a discount on bundled services lost that discount if they signed up for the loyalty program. “Clearly, we’re not doing a good job of explaining the program to customers and we need to make some changes,” a Rogers spokesperson told the Star’s Ellen Roseman at the time.

Two years later Rogers announced the First Rewards program would be discontinued due to low participation. (The program awarded points per dollars spent on Rogers services which could then be redeemed on more data, more minutes, etc.)

Fair to say Rogers customers did not feel the emotional bond that companies seek in establishing customer loyalty.

This has to be fixed. Forrester, an American market research firm, explains it this way: Companies use CRM data “in conjunction with finance and product usage data to gauge a customer's health and intervene when surfacing signs of distress. Actively managing customer relationships affects a company's revenue by reducing churn and increasing customer lifetime value and advocacy. In 2017 companies are becoming increasingly cognizant of the economic value of managing customer relationships. Forward-thinking companies invest in customer success by articulating a customer success strategy and high-level measures of success as well as forming customer success teams that have clear retention metrics and revenue goals for accounts under management.”

So let’s wish Joe Natale well. He’s been smart to highlight the customer as the first order of business. And that mystery company in the opening quote? That’s Nordstrom. The quote is taken from The Nordstrom Way To Customer Service Excellence. “Over the years, they’ve learned that the more service they’ve provided the better their business became. It’s as simple as that,” the authors state.

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Joe Natale’s goal should be to make Rogers the Nordstrom of his industry. In fact, he should obsess about it.

jenwells@thestar.ca

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