Falck ready to respond if loyalty declines

Falck has a good overview of its customers, which offers the opportunity of optimising service levels and thereby the business.

For more than a year, Falck has been working thoroughly on collecting customer reports on each individual business customer. All customers are labelled according to their loyalty, no matter whether it is known or estimated, and the labelling is visible to both the director, the sales consultant and the receptionist.

Over time, Falck has conducted numerous customer surveys at an overall level. Ordinary questionnaire surveys and in-depth interviews have been conducted, and the result has been good strategic reports in which the development of the overall measures can be monitored.

“The strategic surveys are invaluable for us, but we also wanted to look into the individual customer level. It was very important for us to learn more about which customers are satisfied and with what and which are not satisfied,” says Lars Henrik Jensen, market manager at Falck.

“Ennova was one of several providers to submit proposals on how we could solve that task, and we chose them because their solution ensures a high response rate, it can be further developed and it can be integrated with our own CRM system. In addition, all the reports are used for the annual strategic survey, and, in this context, Ennova is statistically strong and helps us calculate the measures for which it would be most profitable to allocate resources.”

The practice behind customer reporting

When Falck’s own call centre contacts a customer to book a sales meeting or provide a service, they ask whether the customer would like to participate in Falck’s loyalty survey and rate Falck’s work. More than half of the customers asked agree to this, and a link is subsequently sent to them. All it takes then, is for the customer to log on to the Internet and complete the questionnaire, and they typically do so within two weeks. Within max. three weeks, Falck receives the customer report at the office, where it is entered directly into the CRM system.

Falck then labels each customer with a colour code so that they can see which loyalty segment the customer belongs to. When Falck subsequently looks up the customer in their system, this loyalty information pops up.

“Everyone with customer contact thereby has the possibility of accessing the customer report. This means that everyone is using the customer report in one form or another when communicating with the customer.”

“Our sales consultants, in particular, use the system. Before the consultant heads out for a sales visit, he gathers knowledge about the customer. He therefore has a clear impression of the customers he is going to meet and what he needs to emphasise. If the customer is happy with Falck, he is satisfied with what he’s getting and so on,” says Lars Henrik Jensen. “At the end of the questionnaire, customers have a chance to provide their own comments, and quite a few use their option to add comments because they know that we read the report. In the beginning, I personally read all the comments received, but that job has now been assigned to our consultants. Our consultants summarise the comments and use them, among other things, to follow up if, for instance, purchase intentions have been expressed in the comments.”

When the warning light starts flashing

“Every time we register a critical customer, we contact the customer immediately – a step that takes precedence over everything else – and we ask them for a meeting as soon as possible. Customers typically welcome such an initiative with open arms. At the meeting, we set up an action plan for how to improve our relations with the customer. The other reports gathered are used at the next natural contact with the customer, which is typically an upcoming sales visit.”

“The customer report is an integrated part of the CRM system. We can monitor the customers’ ‘movements’ in respect of both profitability and loyalty – and we can combine the two sets of information!”

“By combining the various information available, we can now extract information on which customer has moved where. We can compare this with the conditions that we have exposed our customer to.”

“If, for instance, we have offered him poor service in connection with a sales visit, roadside service etc., we can see the effect that this has.”

“Another advantage of this merging of information is that we have been able to estimate the loyalty of all our customers. Ennova has received background data on the customers who had already been surveyed, and, by comparing their loyalty with their history, it was possible to estimate to which loyalty groups all customers belong. In practice, the staff at Falck can see whether there is a report available on the customer or whether an estimate has been made.”

Falck zooms in

“We hope that this will result in a distribution of the customers with profitability on one axis and loyalty on the other. This will give us a more varied picture and will enable us to assess how important it is to move the customers from one category to another.”

“At the same time, we carry out a value calculation in relation to the individual customer groups. We try to calculate how much more a ‘profitable, loyal customer’ is compared with another category. In this way, we can establish the mathematical proof that is often not available when allocating resources to customer care.”

Extra power to the strategic report

“It has a considerable impact on our Board of Executives when we submit a strategic report generated on the basis of currently 2,000 customer reports. In this report, we have calculated the importance of the individual contact points between the customer and Falck (customer service, time spent waiting for roadside service etc.).”

“It turned out that, next to the actual service that we are selling, the sales staff is assessed as having the highest significance for the customers.”

“So we can’t just fire half of our sales staff if they fail to meet sales targets because, according to the customers, the second most important value creator is their contact with our consultants. They are loyalty creators without equal, and that was very important information for us.”

“It was important to learn that the contact was that significant. We probably would never have guessed it ourselves, so it was an incredible eye-opener,” concludes Lars Henrik Jensen.

“We are currently implementing even more precise customer segmentation. For this grouping, we are using five loyalty classes by which to segment. We have always had a typical ABC categorisation of revenue and profitability, but loyalty is now also being linked in so that we can see whether there are customer groups that require special attention.” “It has a considerable impact on our Board of Executives when we submit a strategic report generated on the basis of currently 2,000 customer reports. In this report, we have calculated the importance of the individual contact points between the customer and Falck (customer service, time spent waiting for roadside service etc.).”