What is the company with good customer relations doing right?
The best company reported by American Consumer Satisfaction Index is Apple in the field of personal computers and customer observed Apple as one of the excellent company in terms of customer service. Apple highly focus on product innovation and providing best customer service that has won the hearts of customers and successfully maintain consumer’s loyalty(Kumar &Aksoy et al., 2010).
Research article of 2003 graded Apple as one of the high quality customer service provider on a consistent basis. Also, ranked number 1 customer service provider in 2001 reported in consumer reports annual questionnaire. Not only this, it has also ranked number one desktop repairs in May 2003(Kumar &Aksoy et al., 2010).
What is the company with poor customer relations doing wrong?
The worst customer service of AT&T has arisen the question whether they remain an AT&T customer and labelled, AT&T as the next dinosaur in terms of providing customer service. According to the customer comments, AT&T has failed in providing excellent quality customer service(Morgan & Rao, 2002).
The reported complaint against AT&T was the worst attitude of customer representative that is their Mantra of “we don’t care as we are Telephone Company, and we don’t have to”. This attitude observed by the Weston realize that AT&T will soon become ex Phone Company. FCC records maintained by consumer’s unions generated highest complaint report for the last year by the subscribers of the company(Morgan & Rao, 2002).
What are the results of the actions of the companies? For instance, financial, public relations, or employee issues?
Apple is one of the companies that believe in providing help desk support to its consumers for 12 hours a day and 7 days a week. Moreover, the company provides technical support to its customers in terms of technical issues, information of the product and other services. Also, the employees working in the company have all the managed resources when it comes to responding efficiently, make better response time and to have reduced training costs.Not only this, Apple is efficient in responding to the hardware and software incidents that are number of unlimited reports is answered by the support on time(Kumar &Aksoy et al., 2010).
Further, Apple provides a technician training program in which a consumer can become technical assistant for his own Apple product in context of any technical, troubleshooting support required by him on an immediate basis. Exclusive training materials and technical library is provided for the support of Apple’s Consumers when they are facing technical issues and want to find a solution on an immediate basis(Morgan & Rao, 2002).
However, when it comes to AT&T services initially customer service was its primary differentiator. Also, has received the Baldrige Award in 1992. Later the service strategy of AT&T become worst and facing difficulties to maintain their core essence of the company primary differentiator(Morgan & Rao, 2002).
Many consumers were raising questions against the customer service strategy of AT&T. Employees of the AT&T were not happy with the company’s leadership. The company has failed to resolve the problematic issues faced by the employees and customers. Environmental issues were also developed and reported due to the battery disposal issue that were raised by the government reporting agencies(Ibrahim & Whitt, 2011).
What specific, actionable recommendations would you give for improving customer satisfaction for each company?
For a better customer support program and service company should apply policies that can provide better customer service and maintain customer expectations according the needs and wants of the customer requirements. Moreover, customer value management team needs to focus on the customer acquisition and retention so that customer loyalty can build and possibility of customer percentage increase through fulfilling customer’s requirement and solving the issues faced by them(Bailey & Leland, 1995).
The technical support team of each company needs to make it more professional and friendly when dealing with customers and provide them on time solution or providing them relevant material for their problem solution (Bailey & Leland, 1995).
It is also important that the company should focus on the issues and complaints that are dealing by the company. Also, find ways and techniques to make improvement in the customer service. Three important points that can help in the improvement. Good customer representatives who are professionally and technically groomed and have a complete knowledge about their company’s product(Bailey & Leland, 1995).
Bibliography
Kumar, V., Aksoy, L., Donkers, B., Venkatesan, R., Wiesel, T. &Tillmanns, S. (2010). Undervalued or overvalued customers: capturing total customer engagement value. Journal Of Service Research, 13 (3), pp. 297--310.
Ibrahim, R. & Whitt, W. (2011). Wait-time predictors for customer service systems with time-varying demand and capacity. Operations Research, 59 (5), pp. 1106--1118.
Morgan, I. & Rao, J. (2002). Aligning service strategy through super-measure management. The Academy Of Management Executive, 16 (4), pp. 121--131.
Bailey, K. & Leland, K. (1995). Customer service for dummies. Foster City, CA: IDG Books Worldwide.
