SMBs: How A Business Issue Was Converted Into An Opportunity?

We live in a crowded, complex and competitive world today. Therefore businesses are vying to stay ahead of the curve to serve and deliver to their customers better, all the time. Not just that, they have to constantly innovate, tackle disruptions through constant innovation, improving business experience … all at the same time. This applies to SMEs and Corporate giants alike. Hence, building #AdaptiveIntelligence is key for all businesses to ride over the tide today..

Check this real life example:

One of our top customers (an online retail manufacturer) uses a certain payment gateway service to receive online payments. This service has been working seamlessly over the last 4 years. Around couple of months ago … the retail company started observing a strange phenomenon.

The payment logs started showing up information pertaining payments and customer details only. The product details were missing from the logs completely. Problem? – The retail company’s backend team were unable to establish what product was sold and needed to rely on amount received to guess or call up the buyer and check with them what they purchased? … pretty embarrassing right?

After about 50 such orders and numerous talks with the payment gateway company’s support team, we decided this needs to be looked at differently to ensure – correct products are shipped and customer experience is enhanced (while the payment gateway team works on sorting out the technical issue).

Alongside requesting the product information, we decided to:

a. Treat the call back to buyer as a TRUST and CONNECT call.

• Appraise them about the problem at hand and apologize for the same.
• Thank them for their purchase (although our automated systems do that already – a human thank you has a huge value over an email one)
• Provide them with connect numbers for future connects regarding support and billing.
• Develop trust by answering their questions/queries regarding the product or its use, if any.

b. Gives our SALES TEAM opportunity to promote.

• Other products that customer may need but is not sure of, at the moment
• Ask for active referrals to connect for promotion
• Get feedback on pricing and delivery.

c. Get valuable MARKETING FEEDBACK

• reason, source, timing of purchase would be immensely valuable information.
• use customer inputs to improve products, services and support

We also began integrating other gateways to make sure the experience starts becoming seamless again. However this CUSTOMER CONNECT system has been implemented as a policy decision by customer and results have been outstanding.

We could have gone this route…

We could have continued chasing the payment gateway company to get their problem fixed and continue in the same manner hoping customers wont mind. Would have been a big mistake
We could have shipped products based on pricing information (guesstimates) and face order returns and refunds if the correct ones were not shipped. Customer trust would have taken a big beating.

We would replace the old payment gateway system with a new one (work is already on, anyway) and wait for the problem to be resolved automatically.

However, by defining the CUSTOMER CONNECT route, we were able to address all the above issues and build an even stronger relationship with our customers and grow our business at the same time.

It did not need any number crunching, any logical analysis or technical study. All it needed was being adaptable to the situation at hand with some experience, some user behavior psychology and a lot of courage to TALK TO OUR CUSTOMERS…