CUSTOMER SERVICE IS ALIVE
The final new rule is an obvious one. It essentially highlights or mirrors an organization with an entirely new set of criteria, beliefs, and characteristics that reflect a company truly in touch with its customer base.
If a company can see their customer service as a perfect chance for them to deeply connect with and evolve alongside its lifeblood, it becomes a cultural obsession instead of a mere department. It’s a vital point of differentiation that propels innovation and creates new revenue streams, products, and barriers to entry.
The pursuit of cutting-edge lessons, insights, and ideas from the inside out cannot occur accidentally. There has to be a direct pathway back to the nerve center of the organization, and where better to begin than customer service? I cannot tell you how many suggestions I’ve given to customer-service agents. I have no clue (or faith) as to whether any made it back to the company’s decision-making units. Even if they did, they probably fell on deaf ears . . . as opposed to actually incorporated and acted on.
Regardless, it’s time to transform customer service from a one-dimensional, one-off, and transactional-based exchange into a fluid and integral part of doing business. Combining all physical or store encounters, live chat, and e-mail exchanges—and most recently, social media or virtual conversations—in an evolved Voice of the Customer program is just the beginning. Incorporating this feedback into the very engine of the company—AND communicating progress back to the point of origin—is equally, if not more, important.
Implications: Ten steps you can take to close the loop and use customer service as a live source of ideas, recommendations and productive feedback:
1. Make sure that all customer conversations can be entered into a report and feedback system, which probably means a literal and figurative systemwide upgrade.
2. Foster a culture that values constant customer response.
3. Incentivize customer-service agents to bring them into the ecosystem.
4. Communicate progress frequently back to both agents and customers.
5. When executing customer service in the public domain, for example, via Twitter, use keyword tagging or hashtags to catch significant words and phrases.
6. Just because customers don’t volunteer suggestions doesn’t mean they don’t have them. Explicitly seek suggestions on matters from product development through positioning to service. And when unprompted suggestions are made, close the loop with your customer in terms of follow-up and follow-through.
7. Commit to acting on these ideas. Begin by implementing at least 1 customer-initiated suggestion per month, 12 in the first calendar year, 24 in the next, and so on.
8. Conceive tangible ways to build this service into your value proposition and make your customers (and prospects) aware of it. If necessary, communicate using formalized or paid methods (advertising, collateral) or through informal or nonpaid approaches (word of mouth, seeding).
9. Increase the amount of money in your budget allocated toward human resources and technology. When it comes to customer service, talent is going to prove as important as systems integration, empathy as important as scale, and human labor as important as automation. And as you’ll soon read, this was a trap into which Target Corporation fell, hook, line, and sinker.
10. Measurement is fundamental, so constantly track, evaluate, and tweak a work in progress to ensure that you’re getting the most out of the pathway to your customers. Reconcile medium- to long-term benefit from the implementation of ideas with the investment that was once incurred to produce them.
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.