Time for a new look at customer service

That's the rationale behind market research company Ask Afrika's National Customer Service Delight Index 2004, which puts South Africa's notoriously dodgy service ethic under closer scrutiny than ever before in an effort to give businesses a better understanding of consumers' expectations and needs.

The Index, which is due to be released at a gala banquet later this month, drew on almost 6000 respondents, and involved 24 leading South African companies across nine industries. It evaluated service delivery in various industries, and provides research recommendations that can help companies achieve extraordinary customer service levels.

Ask Afrika managing director Andrea Rademeyer says 'delight ratings' predict loyalty and customer retention, whereas 'satisfaction ratings' don't. The ultimate aim of the Index is to develop South Africa as a service destination. "If we can say our service is better than other countries, then we have an attractive foreign investment proposition," says Rademeyer.

Problem is, the state of service in South Africa is not a pretty sight. "There are pockets of excellence, but people are slow to measure themselves," says Rademeyer.

"Service has improved over the last four years, but the fact is that pleasant surprises delight customers. Every customer contact should be treated as an opportunity to create a rewarding relationship. Companies should get inside the mind of the customer to anticipate their needs before they even know what they want."

Rademeyer says her company's focus on 'delight' is a result of the fact that functional parameters have ceased to be meaningful differentiators for customers to choose one company over the other.

To the modern consumer, customer service is little more than the support activities provided to customers by a company, which they practically take for granted.

"Customer delight is about demonstrating and providing a set of tangible and intangible benefits beyond the functional features, a combination of which provides value beyond what the customer had expected to receive from the company," said Rademeyer.

It is important to recognise that customer delight is a moving target. It is not a fixed benchmark to be achieved. As competition intensifies and responds, the power of some benefits to act as differentiators gets diluted or erased.

Companies, therefore, have to constantly monitor delight levels in relation to competitive offerings. Then they must create both more and innovative value propositions for customers to continue to feel delighted.

"We have to understand how customer expectations and needs change," says Rademeyer. "Those drivers are changing every year. Four years ago, people wanted one-stop service. Last year they wanted a better quality of listening. They wanted to feel that they were being heard and responded to."

In many categories, companies have taken the easy route of providing higher value through lower price. However, not only is there no guarantee of it being a sustainable advantage (because it is replicable by other players too), but it also strips the company of much needed profitability to create and sustain alternate benefits.

Apart from a sensible price point, customers look at company imagery, service, and other intangible parameters for selecting between companies. For a company that seeks to provide ever-increasing service levels and standards, competing on price will seriously limit its ability to invest in technology and resources to provide the desired service levels.

According to Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad, authors of 'Competing for the Future': "There are three kinds of companies. Companies that try to lead customers where they don't want to go; companies that listen to customers and then respond to their articulated needs (needs that are probably already being satisfied by more foresightful competitors); and companies that lead customers where they want to go, but don't know it yet. Companies that create the future do more than satisfy customers... they constantly amaze them."