Technology has yet to change key business tool - customer service

Natalie Maroun

Technology has enabled people to connect with the world and this has shifted the power base from the companies to customers. In the past if customers had a bad experience, their ability to 'tell-it-forward' was only as powerful as the amount of people they knew. Today social media platforms create an environment for people to talk anywhere, anytime.

This did not happen five years ago. Although there were customer service strategies in the past, these, like the company's brand promise and PR and marketing strategies, were isolated from the business operation. What we are seeing now is the need and wisdom of having a coherent strategy that integrates all of these components. In fact, a defined customer service strategy in an integrated environment is the new agenda for companies to successfully win and retain customers.

Key trends

Key trends to shape this new integrated customer service agenda are:

• Leverage service for revenue growth: Best customer service practices need regular engagement with the customer and take advantage of every customer contact. In the past, customer service focused on dealing with, closing and moving on to the next customer as quickly as possible. Today's customers want service beyond the first interaction and we have found that there is a cause and effect relationship between market share, revenue growth and profit and customer loyalty.

• Innovate the customer interface: Customer service has actually gone backwards in areas, where we have taken away human interaction for the sake of expedience, such as telephonic auto queues that lead customers through a maze of options only to find, as a last resort, the option of speaking to a human.

• Integrate customer touch points: This leads to the issue of touch points in the value chain. Companies need to take advantage of every point of customer contact and, in order to maximise the value of every interaction, distinct silos of customer touch points need to be abolished. The biggest frustration for customers is inconsistencies between departments. Customers are not interested in how organisations are run; they are interested in their experience. The ahead-of-the-game players are the businesses who are integrating the management of all contact channels.

• Drive customer-centricity: Customer service relies on one of the largest untapped resources companies have - customer feedback and proprietary customer data. Customer data is the key to everything, however organisations often have so much data that it becomes difficult to discern what is important and what is not.

Master the basics

Mastering the basics of customer service remains the key for customer service organisations that are struggling with poor service and inefficient processes. The challenge lies in putting these changes in place while simultaneously maintaining activities that will truly create value for the organisation.

Performance is no longer measured solely by cost-to-serve. Companies need to ask whether their operation and value chain represent the sentiment of their business and none of this is possible or practical unless customer service is an integral part of an organisation's value chain.