Customer service: could your reputation go up in smoke?

Customer service reputation

One critical aspect of good customer service management is to be well aware of all the smoke signals sent by customer though all available channels including social media. If they are carefully monitored, captured and acted upon they can help create a positive feedback loop initiated by customers for the long term benefit of the company. A thorough handling of complaints for example is an easy to achieve step which could led you a long way towards achieving great results. On the other hand, if a company ignores them or thinks that all the customer feedback is unfair or inaccurate, it runs the risk of seeing a gradual deterioration of its trade and see its reputation go up in smoke.

Customer service at low tide

Customer service at low tide

"Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked". This quote from Warren Buffet says it all. It can easily be applied to the field of customer service and every organisation should anticipate predictable changes in the environment they operate in and assess the impact they may have on their customer service performance.

BIG DATA and customer service

BIG DATA and customer service

Big data and customer service are definitely becoming the in-topics in the digital industry and there association is also increasingly linked with the ability to improve customer service. Capturing the data, harnessing the data, shaping the data, using the data are all common themes which make the headlines everyday. The power of modern computing technology and data analytics allows companies to capture and model the behaviour of their customers and gain a deep understanding of the key trigger points in their day today interaction with the business. Once the hidden patterns and correlations leading to a purchasing action are fully understood, companies gain predictive influence over their customers and can certainly encourage or stimulate additional purchases. Often this is done under the pretense of better customer service and improved responsiveness to customer needs. 

However, before pushing the experiment too far, it is important that companies reflect on the ethical attributes of the techniques being deployed. Provided they are genuinely aimed at delivering a better customer experience, they could be encouraged. If they are purely designed with the objective to milk more out of a customer, often without him or her realising it, then one should pause and make sure that the customers interest is safeguarded before proceeding.

Customer service: the path to nowhere?

Customer service career path

Is customer service a good career path for employees? Through the years of writing this blog, we have establish a (small) number of truth which could be hard to challenge. To name a couple, we have established that quality customer service is a key factor in the long term prosperity of an organisation and that employee satisfaction is a key success factor driving good customer service. Bringing the two together, it becomes clear that any organisation must be able to attract quality employees to its customer service teams and to make it attractive in the long run, convince employees that customer service offers a solid career path. To ensure their long term future companies must therefore make sure that enough attention is paid to the customer service career path, not only to allow development of individuals within the function but also to make sure that they can progress in others parts of the business, such as marketing for example, so that there customer interaction experience can be fully leveraged.

Customer service: the great rotation

The customer service "great rotation" is inspired from the investment community's current hot topic whereby worldwide money managers may reallocate part of their assets towards more risky investments, for example switching from fixed income instruments to equities. This is done in order to benefit from higher equity yields especially given that interest rates will have to stay low for a while to fuel the economic recovery. This is compounded by the perception that interest rates can not really go lower and, as and when they start to increase, the fixed income instruments will suddenly lose a lot of value.

We could write ten blog posts about this topic alone but the interesting analogy is that we believe that a completely opposite movement could be emerging in customer service, whereby companies engage in a great rotation, reducing spend in marketing (risky) to invest more in customer service (safe). The economic benefits of such an approach could be very tangible, with a strong focus on customer retention rather than customer acquisition. If conducted effectively, the benefits of recommendations from satisfied customers would be enough to generate growth and attract new customers. So why not review the relative risk reward benefits of marketing and customer service and use the results to develop the case for the great rotation.

Picture credit: http://www.davidharber.co.uk/ with our thanks

Customer service web

Customer service web

What can spiders web teach us about customer service? Over the years, they have perfected the art of building a structure which catches all. In many environment, if we leave them a little bit of time, they will construct a web to catch food. What about applying the same technique to customer service? Web based customer service would consist of a close knit network of multiple interactions with customers. Perfectly organised as far as the company is concerned but flexible from the customer point of view, service delivery would be based on multiple nodes, interacting with eachother, supporting each other but also each able to do the job should the "prey" fall in their hands. Imagine what would happen if the spider was referring animals caught in its net to another part of their web. They would escape and the spider would become very hungry. Similarly in its interactions with companies, customers are given too many opportunities to leave. The web based approach would no doubt help increase retention.

Picture courtesy of @PedroStephano with our thanks - http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedrostephano/6180403377/