An ever greater degree of customer satisfaction

Our customer services are aimed at all customers who have purchased Tchibo products or who need information before making a buying decision – in Tchibo shops, online and in our concessions in supermarkets and specialist shops. Employees from Tchibo and from external service providers give competent advice over the phone, by email or post, processing enquiries as speedily and unbureaucratically as possible. For instance, customers can order replacement parts or accessories such as vacuum cleaner bags and toothbrush heads, or get information on the delivery status of goods they have ordered.

Closer to you: our customer service

Our customer service department’s call centres feature a range of hotlines with different areas of expertise. In 2010, they received more than five million enquiries altogether, about half by phone, the other half by email. As you can see in the list below, the enquiries mostly concern products and orders. Of all enquiries, 94 per cent can be resolved or orders fulfilled on first contact. This figure is particularly significant for customer satisfaction, because it means that customers are receiving the information they need quickly and directly. And it also represents a boost in motivation for our customer service employees.

Our aftersales department takes care of customers who need attention after having bought a product. Its employees took 295,792 calls and responded to 150,521 emails in the reporting period.

Previously, all hotlines had been run by external service providers. This has now changed: Since 2010, Tchibo employees have been responding to and taking care of customer enquiries, first at the Cafissimo hotline and from 2011 at the PrivatCard hotline as well. Our stated aim is to make customer care more comprehensive, get closer to our customers and respond more flexibly to their needs.

Expert quality assurance: our technical service centres

Complaints about products which are under guarantee are taken care of by three external technical service centres managed by Tchibo and additional service centres run by cooperation partners. Tchibo obtains replacement parts for furniture from various Furniture Service Centres. Our general principle is that, wherever possible, we rectify defects within 14 days, by sending out a replacement part, repairing the product or replacing the item with a new one.

In the reporting period, our technical service centres dealt with approximately 196,000 complaints. At 2.5 per cent, our average rate of complaints remained low. The most common cause for contact with the technical service centres was to request the replacement of a faulty item; other customers asked for repairs, replacement parts or accessories.

Regular checks confirm top-quality service

All processes in service centres are audited regularly. Additionally, our technical services undergo an annual quality audit conducted by an external institute. Auditing criteria include throughput times (i.e. the amount of time it takes a complaint to be resolved), friendliness and specialist expertise, as well as the amount of time it takes to answer a customer’s call. The Tchibo Service Centres achieve consistently very good results. However, here, as in all other areas, we refuse to rest on our laurels, but rather continue striving to keep improving our performance in our customers’ interests.

So that customers receive the best possible service, we have a large number of interfaces between our customer service and the service centres. For example, complaints are fed into our call centres’ systems, so that they can respond with awareness of the situation if the customer should call. It works the other way too: orders for replacement parts are transmitted daily from the call centres to the service centres.

Customers give us valuable pointers

Here, as across our entire business, we want to keep on getting better. The numerous and diverse enquiries we receive from customers from all sales channels, and which we analyse, help us to achieve this aim. They give us valuable pointers on how we can improve. An example might be our improvements to labelling on product packaging: our customers are pleased to find they can now see all the information they want on a product at a glance.

Every point of view counts: our complaints management system

Our response to complaints is just as speedy and reliable. Criticism and suggestions for improvement provide us with the opportunity to continue perfecting our product range, processes and services. To this end, we have developed a detailed guide for our employees, which sets out guidelines for dealing politely and competently with customers informing us of their complaints and lays down rules on how we can accommodate them. All complaints data is fed into a constantly updated database, which we analyse monthly. Management is informed regularly of the results of this analysis and the corrective measures that have been implemented.

The Hanover-based consultancy imug Beratungsgesellschaft für sozial ökologische Innovationen mbH (imug) has been conducting evaluations of our complaints management system since 2009. In 2010, we were able to further boost the quality of our customer enquiries processing in comparison to the previous year, with particularly marked improvements in the quality of the content of responses to complaints made to management. The Tchibo Cafissimo service team, newly established in 2010, has also achieved initial successes: there is clear evidence that the competence of responses to enquiries on Cafissimo is higher than that found in the overall performance of all aftersales teams. We want to keep on improving, and to this end will continue annual evaluations of our systems.