Customer Service
Customer Service and Customer Relationship Management
Customer Service is a broad term covering all levels of service that a client of your company may enjoy in all of their interactions with you in pre-sales, the sales process itself and in post-sales. Broadly, customer service as a 'science' is a "series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction", or in other words "the feeling that your client holds about the product or service that they have from you, and how closely that product or service met their expectations"
At first glance, most managers would argue that any unsatisfactory experience results in a bad 'customer satisfaction' rating! This is the biggest mistake that you can make as a leader or manager of your company! A clients bad experience, lets say for example, a defective or faulty product only becomes an unsatisfactory experience if your company handles their complaint or issue in a manner that doesn't meet their expectations! This is the key point. Customer Service, or the 'art' around the 'science' of managing your client interactions is the vehicle that you use in your company to ensure that you offer the highest possible levels of 'customer service' whilst not unnecessarily increasing the cost of your sales or field operations! In other words, you give your clients, and are seen to be giving an excellent level of service that will not affect your profitability. Obviously, there is definitely a line where you can go 'over the top' in your efforts to provide extraordinary customer service, whilst at the same time actually having a detrimental affect on your business. An example of this could be a contact center, or your front and back office telephone staff. They may spend so much time on the phone with each client that they are having a very negative impact on the queue of customers waiting to be served. The same holds true of the front office, or even in a retail store, where the employee spends 5 minutes chatting with the customer in the front of the line at the checkout, but is flatly ignoring the fact that there at 10 people waiting in line behind them, all frustrated and annoyed that they are being made to wait for too long!
Customers problems with products and services with your company is a HUGE opportunity to extend excellence! It is the one key factor in determining ongoing loyalty to your company and whether or not this customer is likely to buy from you again. Having a faulty product, or a service that didn't go quite right is actually okay, and it is NOT a problem. It is an opportunity for you to tackle the customers complaint with excellence, with empathy, with understanding and with obvious concern to their issue. A well structured Customer Relationship Management philosophy applied through the appropriate sort of solution gives your company EXCELLENT tools to deal with any adversity or client challenge. Often, the issue or service being complained about relates to something that was delivered, installed, shipped, purchased or supplied some time ago, and your companies ability to track down the original transaction (sale) and all data leading up to and after the sale is key!
From a Customer Relationship Management perspective, your companies aim must be at a 1:1 client relationship, not the typical 1:many relationship where the customer feels just like another number, or another one of the hundreds or thousands of clients.
Again, let look at this from a plain, day-to-day perspective from your view as a customer of a company. Let use for example sake your main Checking Bank Account. Let's assume for convenience sake that you've been a customer to your bank for 10 years or more. One day, you need to go and make a new application for a credit card, for a loan, or a mortgage, indeed, any one of the hundreds of products that the Bank spends so much money advertizing and marketing each year.
You approach the Bank with some confidence, right? After all, you've been a customer for 10 or more years, and you've held your account in good standing, indeed, the Bank has made many hundreds or thousands of dollars out of your business over the years. Yet, you feel sorely disappointed and let down, when making the application process is impersonal, driven by a process based interaction, and little or no view is taken about YOU, your HISTORY, your LOYALTY or your long term relationship. Being treated in a sterile, process driven and rather black or white, yes or no, factor driven process for your product enquiry actually leaves you flattened, disappointed, frustrated, and annoyed.
Despite 10 years of loyalty to your local Bank they still tend to treat you as a number. They assess your risk based on your activities with Credit Reference agencies that have NOTHING TO DO WITH THE BANK! They deny your application based on the fact that when measured against all the MANY customers at the Bank you don't quite cut the grade for this latest great offer or product you are enquiring about. Here, my argument isn't about the Banks rules, process, and risk management. It's about the fact that due to their size or lack of flexibility and detailed client knowledge, their very attitude and process turns you into just 1 of MANY. The Bank clerk fielding your product enquiry may only have access to the last 6 months view on your account. What about the other 9.5 years?
Now, had the Bank actually proven to you that they look at you uniquely, on a 1:1 footing, then you'd be happier, even if the net result of your application was a denial. At least you know that they looked at you as a person, as a loyal customer, and as a valued entity. As you can see, its a thin line that a company needs to walk. Balancing good Customer Service with balance and flexibility. The key to success is knowing enough about the customer, their history, their purchases over time, their preferences and other inputs is key to good, no, not good, but excellent customer service. Brandishing a smile, but treating someone on the 1:Many baseline will always result in poor customer satisfaction, and an erosion in loyalty, and definitely impact their Net Promoter Score. Treating each customer as a unique, valuable, important and human entity is King. The result of your customer service engagement need not be directly positive. You will not satisfy all of the demands that your customers place on your business, because, lets face it, their demands are often very detrimental to your bottom line. They may not even be accurate! How can you prove that? How do you justify the decisions you make day in and day out in dealing with your client base if you don't have real data to support those decisions? This is why your CRM strategy is Key!
Customer Service will mean different things to different verticals and companies. For some types of companies it is heavily orientated around a specialist unit, for example, a retail store that actually has a dedicated 'Customer Service' counter where shoppers with problems with product, returns, exchanges or other complaints can go. For other industries it could be a form of 'self-service' customer service framework, like an Internet based helpdesk or support portal for existing clients. It could even be a simple 1-800 telephone number staffed by "Customer Service" representatives, or even a postal based one. (email, or even SMS, or web chat in modern 21st Century business is not uncommon these days!)
Customer Service should form though an intrinsic part of any companies overall customer value proposition. Customer Service plays a key role in your companies ability to generate sales, income and revenue.
Measuring Customer Service itself is actually rather challenging. Typically companies do this by picking on a particular key performance indicator (KPI) and then regularly measure how they are performing against this indicator over time. The Central Florida CRM Solutions team site includes lots of articles and content around some of these topics, so please browse around our site for ideas on how you can use your CRM solution and your own key performance indicators to measure your customer service indicators.
In picking your customer service strategy there are actually some well recognized institutions that focus on nothing other than this domain. These include The International Customer Service Institute, TICSI, which is an international organization that enables the recognition and sharing of global best practices in Customer Service. This was one of the first 'institutes' to create a global standard for customer service excellence.
Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy and solution must have the ability to track campaigns against your key performance indicators for customer service. This tool provides your company with a live, always current 'dashboard' of how your company is performing against its KPI's and with regular review cycles the leadership team is able to reassess, reapply, tweak and change active strategies for driving towards the ultimate customer experience.
Parting note; how often have you phoned a local supplier, and been greeted by an automated telephone system that says "Thank you for calling ACME industries, your call is very important to us, please wait for a specialist.......the wait time is 15 minutes, please hold, your call is very important to us.......". Do you think this is customer service in excellence, or merely a facet of understaffing in the back office? Is understaffing a back office to create these sorts of customer wait times an issue? Maybe not! Consider this....what about telling customers to leave a callback number, and offer them the choice of phoning them back as soon as you can at their preferred number? It costs you no more than the original 1-800 line access for the clients inbound call, but it has an incredible effect on the clients perception of you. Even if your company doesn't have advanced call distribution systems you can still achieve similar profound impacts on customer service, by taking notes on your commitments, and following up accurately and efficiently.
Customer Service is more of an art than a science. With over 25 years in C level executive management of global companies the Central Florida CRM Solutions team is well positioned to help you apply the mandates of "Excellence in Customer Service" as an instrumental element of an applied "Customer Relationship Management" Solution. Contact us at any time for more details.