If You Want to Improve Your Bottom Line, Invest in Your Customer Service

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The blessing (or curse) of running a customer service operation is that you always seem to see things from a different perspective to the rest of the business. For example whilst marketing, sales, product development and even IT are spending small fortunes on increasing market share, launching new products and implementing new systems, customer service is constantly under the hammer to reduce operating costs.

Sometimes I feel like a broken record, saying the same thing over and over again. “Customer service is the customer experience. It’s where the rubber hits the road and either reinforces the marketing message, sales promise and product expectations, or it damages your reputation forever.” In my experience, very few companies have a clear customer strategy. Instead they have a set of functional strategies, driven by different objectives and measured in different ways. The result is inconsistent customer experiences, and internal conflicts as well as poor ROI.

Investing in the customer service operation and bringing into alignment with the marketing and sales operations is the single most valuable investment you can make. These investments take the form of culture, skills, competences, improved management and metrics as well as the systems and customer information required to make use of increased decision-making authority. The business case is compelling. Not only will the satisfaction of both customers and employees increase, operating costs will actually fall by eliminating all the errors and inconsistencies created by the functional strategies. That’s a win-win if ever I heard of one.

So why aren’t more companies doing it? The main reason is the misalignment of the management team. This week I was speaking to the COO of a company that is constantly held up as a shining example of customer service excellence. He told me that over the past 2 years the average tenure of executives had fallen, mainly because they had to remove several because they either did not understand or fully embrace the customer service ethos. In most companies those executives would have remained in place, causing rifts and splits and damaging both morale and the customer experience. The CEO of this company is an ex customer service VP. To me, that says it all.

As a result, they invest heavily in customer service skills, competences and especially culture. People are lining up to work there. The best product and services suppliers desperately want them to buy their products. I bang the alignment drum all day, every day. So it was rewarding to see this paragon of service reinforcing the message. A recent study of the management team by a leading consultant showed they were the most aligned management team he had ever seen. Q.E.D. So take a look at your management team and ask: are they aligned or pulling in different directions?

David Rance
David Rance, CEO of Round, is a former customer care director for a national telco. Round is a leader in capability management models and software tools that enable organizations to align at their chosen level of customer centricity.

2 COMMENTS

  1. David

    An other great article on customer service. It asks the big questions which need asking. And answering.

    The big alignment questions you ask are difficult ones to answer for most C-level executives. The investments you implore them to make are essentially in complex, long-term intangibles with somewhat uncertain outcomes. Culture for instance. Nobody really knows a sure-fire way to make an organisation customer-centric. We can’t even agree on what customer-centricity is! This uncertainty all too easily results in the risk of unintentional factors causing failure becoming too-high.

    Simply looking at successful customer-centric organisations and assuming we can achieve the same results by following the same ‘magic recipe’ suffers from the halo effect and is often more misleading than useful.

    Until we can show in black on white how to do the real-option investment calculations and how to minimise the risk of failure through step-by-step implementation, C-level executives are right to be reluctant to invest.

    Any ideas how best to do this?

    Graham Hill
    Independent CRM Consultant
    Interim CRM Manager

  2. Is customer service the customer experience? Or is experience everything along the value chain? Experience happens at the customer’s mind. Whenever and wherever the customer touches something, physically or mentally, that’s already an experience.

    Daryl Choy
    Make Little Things Count
    wisdomboom.blogspot.com

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