Retaining Customers - BT is one of the largest communications companies in the world.

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Retaining Customers

BT is one of the largest communications companies in the world. One of the services they offer is residential or personal communications solutions. Even though they now have competition from other companies offering consumers substitutes for their service, they still hold the largest market share of providing residential customers with telephone lines. For BT to maintain this market share, they must retain the customers they have. I will be recommending how they can retain their customer base as well as winning new customers. I will be looking at several models and theories in order to do this.

  • Making Customers into Champions
  • The case of the complaining customer
  • The tip of the Iceberg Model

From BT a customer receives a core service. Telephony. The customer expects the telephone in their home to be working when they pick it up. They are not going to be ‘wowed’ by the service if it is just working. However, when the customer makes contact with BT to enquire, change or add something they will use this opportunity to form a perception of BT’s Customer Service. Most people who move to a different telephone provider do so because they perceive indifference in the people they do business with at their current company. Customer feedback tells BT that one of the biggest drivers of dissatisfaction is the difficulty in registering their complaint with BT. A large part of this dissatisfaction stems from a lack of promised callbacks and an initial difficulty in escalating their issue. This feedback has been substantiated by OFTEL in that the number of customers contacting them to complain that they have not received a promised call back has been increasing. OFTEL have given BT a very clear indication that they expect this situation to be addressed and therefore it is paramount that the following recommendations are implemented immediately.

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  • Own, Decide, Do – Training to be rolled out to all Customer Service Advisors. When a complaint is received in the 150 call centres the individual must own the complaint, make a decision about what to do with it and follow any promised action up with a call to the customer to let them know what happened.
  • Keeping the customer informed – With some complaints resolution may not be speedy. There may be some technical difficulties, which hold resolution up. The customer does not know this and will perceive any periods of silence as the ...

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