Ten Compelling Reasons to Deliver an Amazing Customer Service Experience

This list was published by expert and author Shep Hyken.

1. Amazing customer service builds credibility, trust and confidence, which can lead to customer loyalty.
2. It can help the marketing and sales budget. It costs less to keep existing customers than it does to create new ones.
3. Delivering amazing service creates a buzz, word-of-mouth marketing and referrals, again helping the marketing budget.
4. Delivering amazing customer service can lead to existing customers buying more.
5. Customer service saves money. When you do it right the first time, you don’t have to fix it the next time.
6. Customer service can give your company an advantage over competitors.
7. Amazing customer service can make price less relevant.
8. Customer service focused companies are usually employee focused companies, thereby creating a better place to work.
   That means lower turnover, which could mean savings in hiring, training and more.
9. Customer service superstar companies are usually more profitable than the ones that aren’t.
10. Customer service helps get and keep customers… because without customers, you don’t have a business.

7 Keys To Customer Experience

Despite the economic difficulties, there has been a significant uptick in real customer experience efforts. What does real mean? Efforts which address systemic issues like poorly designed interactions, broken processes, outdated business rules, insufficient customer insight and cultures that are far from customer-centric.

Here is some advice by Forrester’s Bruce Temkin for keeping your customer experience efforts on track:

1. Drop the executive commitment facade. It’s very easy for executives to say "customer experience is important." But it’s much more difficult for them to dedicate the time and energy required to make it a real priority. So, executives should either get actively involved in customer experience transformation or drop it from their agendas.

Start here: Develop a customer experience dashboard and manage the results with the same energy that you manage financial results.

2. Acknowledge that you don’t know your customers. When market research teams require long lead times and expensive projects to answer questions about customers, too many organizations go without this insight. But the path to customer experience success requires significantly deeper customer insight. So, companies need to develop voice of the customer programs that provide ongoing and continuous access to customer insights.

Start here: Create a voice-of-the-customer program with a cross-functional team that focuses on four "LIRM" components: listening to customers, interpreting the feedback, reacting to the insights and monitoring results from actions over time.

3. Keep from getting too distracted by social media. Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites may seem sexy, but they aren’t the only channels for customer feedback. Other channels like comments on surveys and calls into the call center can often provide even richer insight. So, companies need to learn from social media feedback, but not overreact to it.

Start here: Treat social media as one of many listening posts in a comprehensive voice-of-the-customer program that examines both structured and unstructured feedback.

4. Stop squeezing the life out of customer service. Forrester's research shows that consumers care more about good customer service than they do low prices. It also turns out that many customer service interactions are critical "moments of truth" that drive customer loyalty. But companies often treat customer service as an unwanted stepchild, focusing almost exclusively on aggressive cost-cutting. So, companies need to start viewing customer service as a strategic asset.

Start here: Measure customer service organizations based on how effectively they help customers instead of efficiency metrics like average handle times.

5. Restore the purpose in your brand. True brands are more than just color palettes, logos and marketing slogans, they’re the fabric that aligns all employees with customers in the pursuit of a common cause. They represent a firm’s raison d’être. Unfortunately, many companies have lost this sense of purpose in their brands. So, companies need to redefine their brand and embed it in the hearts and minds of all employees.

Start here: Translate your brand into promises you will make (and keep) with customers across every key touch point.

6. Don’t assume employees will get on board. Employees are often the most critical element of any customer experience effort. But firms can’t just hope that everyone will participate in these change initiatives. So, companies need to actively focus on engaging employees at every level across the organization in their customer experience efforts.

Start here: Communicate (a lot) about "why" customer experience is important and allow employees to participate in defining "how" to make improvements.

7. Translate customer experience into business terms. Research by Forrester uncovered a strong correlation between customer experience and loyalty. An average $10 billion company can generate $284 million of additional revenues from customer experience improvements. But most companies don’t fully understand the link between customer experience and business results. So, companies need to identify how customer experience impacts their financial results.

Start here: Engage the CFO to develop a model which shows the impact that customer experience has on customer loyalty.

Lacking Customer Focus can get your company in trouble... in at at least nine ways.

I came across this information from Douglas Morse, Managing Principal of the Services Transformation and Innovation Group LLC . I think he is so 'spot on' that I would like to share it with you. Way to go!

9. You focus on product sales and not on customer value.
If you just measure and reward around how much product that you sold last quarter or last year and you don’t maximize the value of those products for your customer, you won’t have a lot of repeat business. The scorecard for your company must focus on things like Time to Value, Customer Loyalty etc.

8. Services profits are used to fund product R&D but you have no Services R&D function.
Innovation is important to product companies. If the products need to be innovative why aren’t the services that surround them? If close to half of your revenue and profit comes from after sales or value added services, how can you not leverage investments in innovation to include Service?

7. You still have a department or separate organization called "service" or "support".
Not only do you have a standalone silo within your enterprise but you make the customers painfully aware of the separation. Quite likely the service organizations are operating with differing and often conflicting metrics than the rest of the enterprise. Driving customer value and customer experience requires that an enterprise works holistically and seamlessly for the benefit of the customer.

6. Your CEO says, and believes, that the services revenue and profit would not exist without the products.
Don’t bother to memorize the CEO’s name; I am sure that his replacement will be much better. There are famous CEOs who actually believe that service would not exist without innovative products. The SONY walkman was a very innovative product but people are buying IPODs today by the millions. WHY? Product innovation alone does not deliver value. This is another example of Darwin being right…

5. Service Innovation, to you, means disintermediation of tasks (like self service ) or by cutting heads and moving them to Timbuktu.
Labor arbitrage is not innovation. Labor arbitrage is a management technique to hide problems through “cost” reductions. No one creates innovation by moving the same old work to new and cheaper labor markets. Transferring tasks that you used to perform to customers as a way for you to save money is also not innovation. Replacing bank tellers with ATMs and forcing the customers to use them to avoid long lines did not add value. Providing access to banking services 24x7 did.

4. Only the services or customer facing groups are measured by "customer satisfaction".
Many companies survey their customers but only a few employees are held accountable. How a customer feels about your product or company and their desire to continue doing business with you is a result of the sum total of all experiences that they have with you. Everyone from the CEO to the Janitor must be held accountable for customer delight. Everyone has a role. If a role in your company does not contribute to customer delight, get rid of it as it adds no value. Once people start to understand their role in delighting customers, you would be surprised with the turnaround of a company.

3. There is no organization in your company that has the title of ‘Customer Experience’.
Go read a book called the “Chief Customer Officer” by Jeanne Bliss. While point number 4 says everyone contributes to customer experience, who do you have that helps to design, create or innovate around customer experience? Customer experience is a complex set of issues and should involve a number of specific disciplines. You might have the best products in the world, you might have top notch services supporting the product and perhaps adding great value, but experience is an emotional state created over time. One bad event erases all the positive ones. This needs to be a core competence in your company.

2. You are expected to deliver improved margins on services even though the product quality is not being forced to improve.
The product group believes that time to market is the number one goal but the service manager is expected to reduce costs as the volume service problems go up. This never happens, right? Alignment of the enterprise is key. Organizations cannot survive with competing objectives. No soccer (football) team ever won a game by having everyone on the field focused offensively on scoring a goal and leaving the goalie as the only person on defense. Winning the game means the right balance of offense and defense is used. Why would it be different in a corporate environment?

1. You have never invited your customer to participate in your strategic planning sessions.
If your goal is to deliver customer value, how can you plan without customers participating? If service is about value co-creation, as it is often defined, how do you do it without the customer as a major player? While I do not mean this in the literal sense of having customer dictate how you operate your business, how do you know that what you are planning to do is going to deliver expected value? Companies that are well plugged into their customer’s value chains are leading in their markets.

Going back to Customer Service fundamentals - INTREGRITY

Dennis AuBuchon published this very pertinent article on the American Chronicle website. It goes back to basic fundamentals and touches on his area of expertise: Integrity.

Customer service is a term that we have come to recognize as a part of the process of doing business or purchasing products or services from a company. This article is about what constitutes integrity in customer service and what does not. Many of us have our own concept of what customer service means to us as individuals. The detail of customer service changes based on the detail and complexity of the product or service we are purchasing. Integrity in customer service is something we as consumers should demand as we have a right to expect it. As a business person customer service is something that has an impact on either retaining customers or losing them. This article will identify some characteristics that are or should be a part of customer service activity for any business. In balancing this article some characteristics which turn off customers will also be identified.

The definition of customer service as defined by www.dictionary.com is assistance and other resources that a company provides to the people who buy or use its products or services. This definition says it all. Customer service involves not only people who buy a company´s products or services but also who use them. True customer service will have a positive impact on retaining customers while bad customer service will in all likelihood cause a company to lose customers. While the definition cited in this paragraph identifies the characteristics of customer service I am going to take it one step further.

Customer service also involves helping people find the products or services they want or need. When a customer walks through the doors of a business they should be met with employees who will ask them if they can help them find what they are looking for. Many times I have walked into businesses and this does not happen. This is not good customer service. While some people may not want to be met by someone as you walk in the door of a business it makes good business sense to do so. People can defer the help if they do not want or need it. Other times while looking for a product and you have a question it is hard to find someone to help. This may not always be the case but when a customer has questions there should be people readily available to help them.

Another aspect of customer service is having the people who know the products in the department they are working. This can make the difference between making a sale and leaving without a purchase. Many companies train their employees well in their products so they can answer customer questions. Another part of this aspect is the integrity factor. Those answering questions should be truthful in the statements they make as it will reflect on the company to have individuals make false statements. The statements may not be recognized to be bad ones until after the sale when customers become dissatisfied with the product or service they have purchased. I have purchased products in the past and have asked questions about different brands and was not given an honest answer. The individual either did not know the right answer or he was trying to sell a specific brand. This has caused me to discontinue being a customer for this company.

Another example of poor customer service is when you ask to speak to a store or department manager about an issue and they do not have the courtesy to respond to you in person. They delegate the action to a subordinate. Some stores have the motto customer service comes first but sometimes this motto is ignored at the highest level in a company or department store. A company must pay attention to their customers and adhere to the concept that customer service comes first. Companies must remember that they would not exist without their customers. If they have poor customer service their customers will not stay long and they will communicate their experiences to their family and friends. This is the kind of publicity a company does not wish to have.

There is a different side to customer service that many may not realize. Customer service does not have to be a face to face encounter. Many more avenues are now available to us than before. Customer service in the past was limited to face to face or on the telephone. Today there is the Internet. Both these avenues will be discussed in the next couple of paragraphs including the good and the bad characteristics of each method.

Many companies now have toll free numbers to contact them with questions. This information can be found on many products that we now buy. When I make a telephone call to a company I expect to talk to an individual not a recording with press this button for this or press this button for that. People like to talk to individuals not recordings. A good characteristic of customer service is having individuals answer the telephone or at least have the option to talk to someone about your problem or question.

There are examples where the choices put you in contact with specific departments and this is great. There are also examples where you do not have this option and this would be poor customer service.

If you have a particular problem you want to talk to an individual not a recording. Many stores also now have web sites and options to contact them. These options are great to get in contact with the main site for a company. It gets information directly to personnel without going through a local store. The key for this option is to voice your opinion about the service you received or the lack of it. The response you receive should address your issue and what action, if any, will be taken. A proper response from company officials would include such items but if the response tends to ignore your complaints then it would be considered bad customer service. Sometimes customers have issues with products that they cannot get an appropriate response from local stores. When a customer receives a product that they have ordered which is damaged an appropriate response from a store should not be to refund part of the purchase price. Customers should demand the quality product for which they paid. It is also inappropriate to offer another higher priced product to replace the damaged one and expect the customer to pay the difference. Both of these actions are inappropriate and are prime examples of poor customer service. If a customer wanted a higher priced product they would have purchased it. Companies who offer higher priced products are trying to avoid their responsibilities to assure that the customer receive a quality product for which they paid.

The above examples that have been identified in this article represent what customer service is all about. Customers who order or purchase products or services have a right to expect a quality product or service. The true test of the customer service a company has is in the service after the sale. When customers are not satisfied with a product or service they should voice their opinions loudly and those in management at the corporate or local level should be willing to listen. Management at a local facility of a company should be available to talk to customers who have complaints. Ignoring these customers and delegating to lower subordinates turns off customers and leaves a bad taste in their mouths. This kind of experience is how companies loose customers.

Many companies have mottos or policies posted prominently such as customer service comes first. When companies do not follow through with their posted policies it not only projects an image that their word cannot be trusted but that they lack the integrity that is so needed in today´s economy.

A poem on customer service...

Here is a poem Ithat Edgar A. Guest in 1942 wrote about the subject of
good service called "Good Business".


If I possessed a shop or store,I'd drive the grouches off my floor!
I'd never let a gloomy guyoffend the folks who come into buy
I'd never keep a boy or clerkwith a mental toothache at his work,
Nor let a man who draws my paydrive customers of mine away.

I'd treat the man who takes my timeand spends a nickel or a dime,
with courtesy and make him feelthat I was pleased to close the deal
because tomorrow, who can tell?He may want stuff I have to sell,
and in that case, then he will beglad to spend all his dollars with me.

The reason people pass one door to patronize another store,
it is not because the business placehas better silk, or gloves, or lace
or cheaper prices, but it lies in pleasant words and smiling eyes;
The only difference, I believe, is in the treatment folks receive.


What say you? Any thoughts, comments?

Eric Fraterman

Trends in Customer Service What is happening out there?

In the December newsletter of the Toronto chapter of the International Customer Service Association (ICSA), the president highlighted some areas of focus. These are based on her conversations with many members over the past few months.

"There is no doubt that there is a growing strategic importance of customer service to an organization’success. As industries mature and organizations can no longer differentiate themselves by products or pricing, customer service becomes a critical competitive advantage. Every manager, regardless in which department they work, is coming to realize that service and support interactions are often theonly direct contact the company has with the customer. The quality of those interactions has a significant impact on long-term business success.

Management in customer service is facing increased pressure to do more with less, and also to contribute to top-line revenues. Many are being asked to provide service to more customers and/or support a wider range of products and services, even as budgets are reduced or remain flat.

There is a need seek ways to improve operational efficiency while building a world-class customer service organization. The best way it seems is to deliver the quality service to retain the loyalty of customers while ensuring KPI’s are met.

Another area of concern is the emphasis on common management of diverse customer service communications channels. This includes the phone, email, web, and chat. A need to integrate responses through these channels as a single, highly manageable queue to optimize overall efficiency and deliver consistent and accurate answers regardless of the channels is paramount."


What say you? Comments? Ideas?

Eric Fraterman
eric@customerfocusconsult.com
http://www.customerfocusconsult.com/

Is the customer always right?

Customers often criticize companies for poor service, poor workmanship, or just being sleazy. But despite conventional wisdom, the customer isn’t always right. Sometimes the consumer is right, sometimes the company is right, and sometimes the answer falls somewhere in between.

Customer interactions aren’t always black-and-white. But if the adage ”the customer is always right” does not really hold any more, companies need a new way to think about how they should treat customers. Forrester's Bruce Temkin provides these 5 principles to use in place of "the customer is always right":

1. “Right” is in the eyes of the beholder. Enforcing a policy that’s in tiny print on the back of a sales slip may be legally correct, but that doesn’t make it “right.”
2. It costs less to solve a problem than you think. Firms build models to figure out how much they’re willing to spend to solve a customer’s problem. But these calculations typically do not factor in the downside associated with bad word of mouth and the upside associated with good word of mouth.
3. The best resolution is a quick one. If you’re going to fix a problem, you’ll get the most goodwill by doing it right away. Customer appreciate the pro-activeness and they don’t have to suffer through a period of anxiety.
4. Not all customers are equal. Don’t use the same rules for treating your most profitable customers that you apply to your less desirable ones.
5. The customer is more often right than wrong. If there’s any doubt; treat them like they’re right.

The bottom line: Right or wrong, you’ve got to love your customers.


What say you? Comments? Ideas?

Eric Fraterman
eric@customerfocusconsult.com
http://www.customerfocusconsult.com/