In a new video interview with a marketing personality, Michael Leander talks with Fredrik Abildtrup - the CEO of TeleFaction. Fredrik Abildtrup talks about the importance of the customer experience and how to measure the customer experience.

Michael Leander’s shades is not a case of imitating the Blue Brothers, but rather a precaution due to an exceptionally vicious eye-infection at the time of shooting.

Watch the video here

Fredrik Abildtrup can be found on LinkedIn, at TeleFaction’s corporate website in English, in Danish or in German. TeleFaction is also the publisher of the Return on Behavior Magazine in English and in German.

Measuring the customer experience LIVE is important for any company with a reasonable amount of inbound customer service calls, incoming emails etc. Judging from what I have seen some of TeleFaction’s banking, insurance and energy customers achieve with their Return on Behavior concept, this methodology has got to be one of the most efficient methods to measure the customer experience around.

If the customer experience is important to your company, I recommend a talk with TeleFaction. They service clients in eight European countries and expect to start serving customers in North America in the foreseeable future.

PS: I am not paid to write this, I am merely very enthusiastic about the Return on Behavior concept, as I find it makes so much sense and provides a great return as well.

Incidentally, you can hear Fredrik Abildtrup talk about measuring the customer experience at these Markedu web seminars:

- September 10, 2009: Measuring the customer experience - free webinar
- November 10, 2009: Measuring the customer experience - free webinar

A webinar is an online seminar. All you need to participate is your computer with sound (and of course internet access). It is an easy and convenient way to learn.

Transcript

Michael Leander: Hi! This is Michael Leander. I’m in Denmark in a place called Vedbæk, very close by the ocean and I’m here with a special person. It’s a person whom I’ve known for a number of years and he is probably the most knowledgeable person I know - when it comes to the customer experience and especially measuring the customer experience. His name is Fredrik Abildtrup and I’ve ask him to join me here to answer a few questions. Hi Fredrik!

Fredrik Abildtrup: Hi Michael!

Michael Leander: Could you first tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, what your company does?

Fredrik Abildtrup: Yes I can. I’m sitting here by the beach with the sun shining. It’s hot. So I’m looking a little bit like this because of the sun, it’s strong. I’m Fredrik Abildtrup. I’m the managing director of the company called TeleFaction where we thrive on delivering customer experience to our clients. TeleFaction is a close-loop feedback management company specializing in meausring the customer experience.
We have a concept called Return of Behavior which collects data on the customer experiences and transform those data into actionable insights. And these insights you can use to improve customer experience, increase sales and ensure loyalty, reduce retention and that sort. So this is what we do. We are a company with our headquarters in Copenhagen who also have activities in Sweden and in Switzerland and a partner in Benelux. And we have clients where we are delivering our services in eight different countries now. We’re growing and are venture funded company still in a heavy growth phase.

Michael Leander: Excellent. Could you tell us a bit about why you believe the customer experience should be an area of focus right now?

Fredrik Abildtrup: Customer experience has always been important and why? Because you as a business owner, a sales person, a customer service manager who wants to know what the customer thinks about what you do. Are we delivering the right stuff and do we deliver in the right quality?
Are they satisfied with the service that we provide and if you don’t ask your customers well you don’t know.

And how do you put some proof and to you ensure that you are doing the best effort each and every time the customer comes at you. So that’s the reason why customer experience is in such focus. But it’s not only asking them about what they do but also listening to but the most important thing about this is actually that you start doing something about it as well. That you act upon this information that you gather.

Too many companies are doing customer experience surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, whatever they call them, but basically what they do is they do a measurement in a certain period of time where they collect the data and then they give a number and then they say look the satisfaction is like this and then everybody is happy.
You need to work with this constantly. It should be a continous process. You should measure each and every day, each and every time the customer comes at you, you should have an idea on what that customer experiences.

If you don’t do that you don’t have the feeling, the temperature, the measurement done on what the customer thinks about what you do and you won’t be able to see the strength of historical data or have you improve or and do the analysis on of which drivers are the most important or which drivers satisfaction or cross sales, or loyalty.
So it’s evident, it’s important and especially now with the credit crunch that’s going on. Retention is the key so how do I keep the customers? How do I keep the customers satisfied so they don’t lose money or lose business? How can I still up sales when there’s credit crunch? If you don’t listen to the customers, don’t listen to what the feel or what they do, you won’t be able to do that. You can ask them directly how loyal are you? You can ask them if they’re willing to buy more and base on that data you go ahead and do something about it. So it’s important, it’s crucial if you want to grow your business. That’s for sure.

Michael Leander: Very interesting. How would you say if you look at the old fashioned - so to speak - sporadic measurements, are they still valid or do you favor a more live measurement based approach?

Fredrik Abildtrup: Basically you see you should plan out on what to do about it and the - what you called sporadic measurements - could still have a value for them and if you do it more qualitatively. If you want to find out within a range of questions like 40 or 50 a hundred questions on some specific behavior points or specific ideas you want to test then its fine. But if you’re talking about the day to day business, the daily customers and the data that you’ve got and doing it live, doing it real time, doing it directly as to experience which is quickly as I believe, measure the experience right after it happened?
And that is where you get something tangible, that’s where you can do something on a daily basis to improve the experience. And the databases to grab hold of the dissatisfied customers and do something about it that’s where you have the chance especially in the world where magazines have these commercial ads are being have as a tool to have a breakthrough with and they are going numb to those kind of communication. So when they finally contact you well they have a chance to do a difference and you should grab that chance sell and retain and keep them loyal feel some or rather fill some needs of theirs so that you can do something about it. That’s the reason why you should do it each and every day in our optic.

Michael Leander: So you mean in order to turn your answers into some actionable knowledge?

Fredrik Abildtrup: Yeah exactly. So you can ask of course the customers with what experiences you’ve had which is important and in terms of getting some feedback back to the representative sitting behind the register, answering the phone, wherever your contact points are, the touch points are. But another process is to ask those actionable questions like where you after another product and not the one you called about that could be things about would you recommend us to others? That could be specific opinion questions. That could be other behavioral questions that you want to insure that it happened in this experience. And that’s very where it comes to doing things every day it becomes very strong. You can start tracking, you can start monitoring and how things do and by being a little bit more advance we see that now as a trend by not only collecting the feedback from the customer but also giving the customers a chance to get back some riveting comments even value at the customer experience measurements with specific reasons for why the sales experience was good or why these other experiences were bad? The last service was done by insurance customers in these areas showed that 35% of the cases where a client was dissatisfied were actually due to the employee not doing their job the right way. Those are things that you can act instantly, do something about it but in the mere 65% of the cases it actually showed that it was the processes of the company that was wrong. They didn’t receive the quote they ask for. They didn’t receive the policy that they’ve asked for. They simply feel that the price were too high. They didn’t like what the company did in a specific manner. So that’s things that the individual cannot do much about but that some functions in the company could do something about it. You can use this to gather different kinds of information and then get some insights for the company view but also some of the employee view basically. -And by that much more intelligence to the clients.

Michael Leander: Very interesting. How can people get a hold of you Fredrik?

Fredrik Abildtrup: Well they can write me at FAP@telefaction.com also on twitter to the Telefaction there they can find me the Linkedin or go to our web pages we got telefaction.com. They can read about us and find Mikey Fast as well. There’s a video explaining what we do. And once you go there we have an inspirational magazine Return on Behavior the magazine.com where you can read different articles on viewpoint of the latest within customer experience. We have other experts as well chipping in with their insights and ideas on how to improve experiences, loyalty and stuffs like that from a customer perspective from my perspective. So go in there have a look and feel free to contact me. I’ll be happy talk with you if you would.

Michael Leander: Excellent. Thanks a lot Fredrik.

Fredrik Abildtrup: You’re welcome.

Michael Leander: Have a good day.

Fredrik Abildtrup: You too. Bye.

Michael Leander: Bye.

Transcript provided by Phil Trans Group