- Ensuring that your organization is getting
maximum benefit from the effort and investments
you're putting into customer service
is an important leadership opportunity.
Let's explore ways you can boost the value
of customer service.
There are three levels on which
effective service creates value.
The first is efficiency.
Accurate workload forecasts and schedules,
good quality that prevents rework,
effective self-service systems,
these are all aspects of ensuring
that customer service is efficient.
A second level of value is contribution to customer loyalty.
If you measure customer satisfaction
before and after a customer service interaction,
effective service should translate into higher scores.
In a study often sited in business schools,
Marriott found that 89% of customers
who had no problems were likely to return.
94% of customers who had problems,
but were then resolved, were likely to return.
A third level of value is cross-functional,
or what some call strategic.
Here a customer service contributes value
to other functions across the organization.
Let's look at this one a bit deeper.
Every day, your customer-facing services
have visibility on the organization's products,
and services, and processes.
When captured and used, this insight can help
the entire organization.
For example, effective service assists sales and marketing
by providing insight on what customers want and expect.
We can help operational areas or manufacturing
pinpoint and fix quality problems,
and improve user guides.
We can help research and development, R&D,
identify customers wants,
and the organization's competitive strengths and weaknesses,
and where the innovation opportunities are.
Effective service is an early warning system
for potential legal troubles from product defects,
security holes, and apps or websites,
inaccuracies and warranty statements,
and those sorts of things.
We can also identify improvements needed
in self-service capabilities,
which lowers the cost of providing service,
and improves the organization's capacity.
I love discovering inspiring examples
of how organizations leverage these opportunities.
For example, the Australia Zoo turns customer inquiries
into ideas for customer visitor packages,
such as The Koala Experience and The Wombat Encounter
which has boosted revenues for visit
and encouraged repeat visits.
Moen, a manufacturer of faucets and fixtures,
mines customer interactions to guide
how-to videos on YouTube.
Intuit uses customer insight when designing
accounting packages for specific types of businesses.
And the Bose Corporation analyzes customer inquiries
for ideas on simplifying product design,
and improving the clarity of user guides.
A practical way to identify these opportunities
is to build a cross-functional team
to analyze the reasons for customer service interactions,
graph the frequency of top drivers to discover trends,
and then act on what you're learning.
There are two categories of information that are essential.
One comes from the interactions themselves.
What are the drivers of customer service issues?
What are the reasons that customers need help?
And what do you learn in the course
of handling those interactions?
A second source of information comes from assessing
the impact of improvements.
For example, how many calls are avoided
as you improve self-service?
How are customer reviews influenced by service improvements?
A consumer products manufacturer I once worked with
discovered that 11% of the contacts on a cleaning product
were simply due to the childproof cap
damaging the spray nozzle as it was removed.
A redesign eliminated those interactions
and prevented problems for countless future customers.
While there's no one report for cross function benefits,
it's important to make estimates on the value
of these contributions.
Candidly, only a small percent of organizations
harness the potential value of customer service,
and only some go the extra step to quantify the impact.
So as you develop this area,
you'll be among the few and the best.
And you'll be taking the conversation
around the value of service to a whole different level.