Companies flirting with brand disaster… The research shows that customers in the UK are losing patience with excuses from companies such as banks and utility companies about ‘missing files’ and are ready to switch brands in protest. The research, conducted across a sample of 1,000 UK adults, shows that one in five (20 percent) of those questioned gave poor customer service resulting from lost documents as a reason to change brand and six out of ten people (58 percent) questioned said that they would lose trust in brands that lost or were unable to retrieve their information. According to Mark Donkersley, managing director at AXS-One Europe, the financial damage to companies because of lost customers is potentially severe. “Losing a customer because of what boils down to poor digital archiving is like throwing shareholders’ money down the drain”, he said. “The cost of replacing a single lost customer can range from a few pounds to three or even four figures, without even considering the lost revenue stream. What is certain is that the total cost is many times higher than the cost per customer of a robust digital archive. “Risking 20 percent customer defections is plainly a poor business proposition. Not only is there no need for this to happen with today’s technology, but companies can actually save money and improve efficiency by having better records management systems in place.” Other findings from the research include: • 69 per cent of the population regards the loss of documents as unacceptable, given the IT systems that are available today to prevent this from happening; • One in eight UK adults (rising to one in seven in the A/B social groups) has had direct experience of the problem, having been told that important documents have been lost by a bank, utility or government department. “AXS-One’s research shows that time is running out for organisations still using ‘missing files’ as an excuse for bad service”, continued Mark Donkersley. “Customers understand that the technology now exists to solve this problem completely and they don’t react well to organisations that continue to experience problems by not adopting readily available technology. The time has come for companies that value their brand reputation to put in place a reliable answer to records archiving. “Damaging customer relationships unnecessarily is bad enough, but in our experience the problems caused by poor records management go even wider than this. The lost time from searches for missing files can easily run into hundreds of thousands of man-hours per year, even in a medium-sized company. And many companies have incurred massive fines from courts and regulators, or have had expensive judgements given against them by employment tribunals, because they could not produce the relevant evidence quickly enough. All this pain is wholly unnecessary, especially as records management systems usually pay for themselves in storage and efficiency savings alone.”
•Date: 1st Dec 2005 • Region: UK • Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity |
