Post by Martin Hill-Wilson on 12 May 2008
Great Customer Service Is A State Of Mind
My current favourite brand is Oppo, not one that I’m sure many will have heard of as yet. However given the way they deliver product excellence and outstanding customer service, they are definitely a rising star to learn from.
Oppo make DVD players. In fact they are a western offshoot of a massive Chinese manufacturer that makes many of the top tier players that we buy in the West. On the back of that expertise they have decided to enter the market directly with stunning success to date.
Their model is text book which unfortunately is not to say that such approaches are in the least bit common in today’s market which is beset with indifference to product quality and mediocrity towards customer management.
Their product strategy is clear. Build the best they can using quality components, obsessively tweak functionality to deliver the best possible output and then offer this benchmark capability at a quarter of the competitors' price range. And this is achieved despite the conventional wisdom that only mass volume manufacturers can afford such discounting based on economies of scale.
This in itself is pretty good and has been borne out in objective benchmarks. The ‘Secrets’ benchmark for dvd players which again is not a point of reference that many in Europe will have heard of, but is the accepted US gold standard, recently gave Oppo's latest player a full 100 points i.e. 100% score. Once you realise that even $5,000 players only achieve early to mid nineties scores, the scale of their achievement becomes clearer. Oppo’s player by the way comes in at $399.
Achieving that level of excellence is not a hole in one. Instead the company take a typically Eastern view on each new product. They listen and learn fast from customer feedback and reflect that back in terms of new firmware to fix issues and introduce new functionality that customers request if the core technology can support it. In other words heart felt continuous improvement is part of Oppo’s DNA.
What intrigues me about Oppo is that the brand is not just excellent at the product side of their business but also as a service brand. Their customer interaction is second to none. Emails are answered normally within 2 hours by experts who care and who know. How they manage their collective knowledge and persuade such technical folk to be quite so sensitive and expert in customer management is a real treat for disillutioned consumers such as myself who still like to believe it's possible to enthuse customers and turn them into raving advocates as I’m currently demonstrating.
So what’s prompted this unbridled accolade? Simply the following, typically depressing snapshot piece of research from Transversal…..
”Of the 100 organisations emailed by the firm, 54 per cent gave inadequate answers to the queries posed to them.
Meanwhile, the average time e-contact centres took to respond to emails stood at two days - some firms responded within minutes, but three in ten did not reply at all.”
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