Strategic Five Marketing Reduce Customer Complaints by 26% Since Launching Weekly Compliance Training

Direct sales and marketing company Strategic Five Marketing has seen customer complaints fall by more than a quarter over the last 8 weeks. This improvement in customer care has been facilitated by the introduction of weekly compliance training at the beginning of September.

Ben Lambert, managing director of Strategic Five Marketing, explains that the decision behind the training sessions was to separate the firm from the competition. “We understand that direct sales can have a bit of a reputation for ‘hard sales’, and while this is something we have never encouraged, we felt that we could do more to align ourselves with our clients’ goals and the needs of our customers.”

Strategic Five Marketing had previously held monthly compliance training sessions, but it was felt that these sessions were not frequent enough to cause lasting impact. The company is very data-orientated, and measures the impact of compliance training by the volume of customer complaints received. “We noticed that for the first week after the training, complaints went down, but gradually started to creep up again over the following three weeks. It’s inevitable that as humans we do forget, so we decided to change the structure. Instead of one long monthly session, we broke it up into short weekly meetings, which have now become ingrained in our schedule,” says Ben Lambert, managing director of Strategic Five Marketing.

Customer service and corporate compliance are important issues for Strategic Five Marketing. Research from the Institute of Customer Service reveals that customers are more likely to complain about goods or services now than they were five years ago despite a lower proportion of customers actually experiencing problems. The report shows that in January 2008, 17% of customers reported experiencing a problem, but by July 2012 this had fallen to 11.7%. However, the percentage of these customers filing a complaint rose from 72% to 76% in the same period. 62% of all complaints involved were people-related, with customers citing poor staff attitude and incompetence as the top reasons for complaint.

“The fact that most customer complaints are caused by the people they interact with is not surprising; at Strategic Five Marketing we always promote a positive and helpful attitude when dealing with customers. Generally, the complaints we received in the past were due to small lapses in concentration or judgement. With the weekly compliance training we are able to consistently reinforce the importance of customer care and procedures, and so far the results have been very positive. We don’t want compliance to be another box we tick; we actively incorporate it into the company culture,” says Ben Lambert, managing director at Strategic Five Marketing.

Strategic Five Marketing is an outsourced firm based in Reading, Berkshire, and supplies clients in various industries including energy, telecommunications and non-profit.

Source:

http://www.smallbusiness.co.uk/news/outlook/2143298/consumers-more-liable-to-complain-about-goods-and-services-in-2013.thtml