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Note: Supplemental materials are not guaranteed with Rental or Used book purchases.
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What is included with this book?
JOHN A. GOODMAN (Arlington, VA) is Vice Chairman and co-founder of TARP World -
wide, an organization Tom Peters has called “America’s premier customer service
research firm.”
The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
INTRODUCTION
Why StrategicCustomer Service?
EVERY ORGANIZATION’S SUCCESS depends on its keeping customers
satisfied with the goods or services that it offers, yet most executives
tend to view the customer service function of their business as little
more than a necessary nuisance. That strikes me as paradoxical. Companies
that spare no expense to build their brands, improve their operations,
and leverage their technologies often skimp on investments that preserve
and strengthen this final, vital link in their revenue chain. Indeed, leaving
aside the investment aspect, many of these same companies simply
don’t have a customer service strategy to manage the end-to-end customer
experience, from sales to billing.
That is why I have aimed this book at all senior management, with
an emphasis on finance and aspiring chief customer officers. The book
will not focus on answering the phone, but rather on the revenue and
word-of-mouth implications of having or not having a strategic approach
for all customer touches and managing an end-to-end experience.
As we all know from being customers ourselves, poor service can
undermine all of a company’s efforts to retain and expand its customer
base. As customers, we know how we respond to poor service: We go
elsewhere, and we often tell our friends and colleagues to do the same.
But as businesspeople, we undergo a kind of amnesia that prevents us
from seeing how that same mechanism applies to our customers. Not long
ago, I was speaking with the CFO of a leading electronics firm who suffered
from this amnesia. As an engineer, he felt that the superiority of
his company’s electronic products ensured their superior market position.
I then asked him what brand of car he drove and how he liked the dealership.
He scowled and said, ‘‘I hate them! They’re just terrible.’’ When I
pointed out, ‘‘You have customers who feel the same about your company,’’
he immediately saw my point.
Some executive teams, blessed with extraordinary empathy or insight
(or perhaps competitiveness), do understand the role of customer service
in the growth of their revenue, profits, and business. My work with organizations
that consistently excel at this responsibility has led me to conclude
that they have one thing in common: a strategic view of, and
approach to, customer service.
A strategic view perceives customer service as vital to the end-to-end
customer experience, and thus to the customer relationship. This view also
considers customer service to be a full-fledged member of the marketingsales-
service triumvirate. Such a view starts with setting expectations,
moves on to selling and delivering the product in ways that suit the customer,
and extends through superb support and clear, accurate billing. A
strategic approach also recognizes that the service function produces a
wellspring of data on customer attitudes, needs, and behavior. These data,
when combined with available operational and survey data, can be used
as input in virtually every effort to shape the customer experience, from
product development to marketing and sales messages, and from handling
of customer complaints to the overall management of the entire customer
relationship. In these ways, customer service acts as a strategic catalyst
for every organizational function and process that touches the customer.
Why a strategic catalyst?
Strategic customer service stands at the point where all organizational
strategies come to fruition in a great customer experience—or
do not. Product development, operations, marketing, sales, finance,
accounting, human resources, and risk management all affect the cus-
tomer in myriad ways, for better or worse. But when something goes
wrong, customers don’t call the director of product development, the
manager of operations, or the vice president of marketing (and they probably
shouldn’t be calling salespeople—about which more in Chapter 3).
They call customer service. When they do, customer service must preserve
the relationship, gather information, and improve the process,
wherever the problem originated.
As a catalyst, strategic customer service can, like any catalyst, transform
the entities and functions it touches, making the organization more
proactive, accelerating its responsiveness, and boosting its effectiveness.
Service can help marketing, for instance, move from sales messaging to
capitalizing on customer intelligence and improving products and services.
For example, Allstate is now contacting the parents of young
motorists as they turn 16, before they pass their driver’s tests. The company
suggests a parent-teen contract, explains how the impending rate
increase will be calculated, and provides guidance on coaching new drivers
(including an extremely popular Web video whose music has moved
into the mainstream). This program results in calmer parents who feel
more in control and who exhibit significantly greater loyalty to Allstate.
Likewise, strategic customer service can accelerate product development
and uncover new distribution channels. It can relieve salespeople and
channel partners of troubleshooting duties so that they can focus on selling.
It can transform finance from a countinghouse into a funding source
that is supportive of new processes and services that increase customer
retention, positive word of mouth, and market share.
Moreover, strategic customer service is applicable in any market,
from consumer packaged goods and financial services to health care, from
business-to-business environments such as chemicals and pharmaceuticals
to government agencies and nonprofits. TARP has helped organizations
in all of these arenas to benefit from a strategic approach to service,
beyond the tactical service functions of responding to customer inquiries
and problems.
BEYOND THE COMPLAINT DEPARTMENT
Customer service has come a long way from the days when ‘‘complaint
departments’’ received letters from irate customers and decided whether
to ‘‘make good’’ on some explicit or implied promise. Today’s tactical
service function is often outsourced, offshored, and global, supported by
state-of-the-art technology, aligned with the brand strategy, and integrated
with the customer experience. It is now a support, sales, and relationship
management function. It’s a means of tracking the value of every
customer and, on that basis, satisfying customers, delighting them,
explaining why you’ll have to charge them more, or gently showing them
the door. Service interactions are also the prime generator of the single
most powerful marketing mechanism: positive word of mouth and word of
mouse.1 Companies with great word of mouth incur almost no marketing
expense because they let their customers do their selling for them.
None of this happens by accident or only at the tactical level. It
happens when senior management grasps the pivotal role of service in
the customer relationship and recasts this outcast stepchild of marketing,
sales, and operations as a guide, problem solver, communicator, reporter,
and breadwinner. Often, the executive committee anoints one of its
number as the chief customer experience officer. Where such a position
doesn’t exist, the head of customer service often performs that role.
The evolution begins with an examination of the current customer
experience, all current customer service and customer-touching activities,
and your current sources of information on those activities. Take
market research. Recently a telecom executive told me, ‘‘We’re spending
$12 million a year on surveys, and we have almost no actionable information.’’
Once the company recognized this, it used customer contact data
to supplement the surveys and produced a real-time picture of the customer
experience. This, along with data on product performance and
problems and on customer attitudes and preferences, enabled the company
to identify massive savings while improving the customer experience.
Some companies know the value of customer contact data, yet even
I was surprised to hear Powell Taylor, the General Electric executive who
established the GE Answer Center, say, ‘‘The average GE customer service
rep can provide the input of data equal to about 10,000 completed
market research surveys, because that is how many customers they’ve
talked with.’’ That makes a strong case for compiling and analyzing data
from customer service interactions. That’s also why the GE Answer Center
reports to the Appliance Division’s senior management.
So, in both purpose and functionality, customer service has evolved
far beyond the complaint departments of 30 or more years ago to become
pivotal in building and sustaining customer relationships.
