Decreasing Costs to the Detriment of Customer ServiceA significant number of companies today are concerned with customer service, but how many really know how to improve it? It is so often the case that profit is put ahead of customer service and this is so often to the detriment of the customer. Take for example the number of organisations that have outsourced part of their operations in order to reduce there operational costs. The overall cost of this strategy may be to reduce the cost of the outsourced operations, but it leads to a lack of control, causing poor customer experience and results in customers leaving our organisation. So what can we do to enhance our customer experience?
How can we enhance customer service?The first thing an organisation should do to enhance the customer experience is take control of it. Our organisations need to be able to control, or at least put in place some agreed level of service with our business partners, to ensure customers receive an appropriate level of service. Once we have control, we have the ability to measure and manage customer interactions which provides us a quantifiable customer service baseline. We then need to carefully design every customer interaction to ensure that each and every customer interaction is a successful one. By aligning our strategy, our business and our processes to deliver the successful customer outcome, every time we can then guarantee the quality of our customer service.
Best Buy, the largest dedicated consumer electronics retailer in the United States, provides a good example of a company that enhanced customer service. Faced with increasing competition from both retail and online stores, Best Buy committed to enhancing customer service by owning the customers' problems and working creatively to solve them. It educated its employees about the benefits of an outside-in customer perspective, helping them deliver successful solutions for customers. This approach not only tackled internal problems such as breaking down internal silos, it helps explain why Best Buy is still around while its main competitor Circuit City, who faced the same tough times and who employed cheap, unskilled customer service staff, is no longer operating. The CEMMethodThe alignment of our organisations to deliver successful customers outcomes can help us focus on what is really important, our customers. This focus ensures our employees are aligned to delivering exceptional customer service. By designing customer interactions we can look to remove or improve those interactions that cause customer dissatisfaction and also cause unnecessary work for us. The success of Best Buy is underpinned by their ability to deliver exceptional customer service. The same techniques they used to achieve this level of service are available to you through the CEMMethod. So if you are looking to enhance your customer service, then our consulting and training services provide you with the techniques to achieve your goals.
See also Previous - enhance the quality of your products Next - break down the barriers and internal silos See our methods here. |
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Customer experience brief | |
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