MANAGED SERVICES customer ser vices
service should excite/extend beyond mere satisfaction?
Whatever the definition, there was a general acknowledgement that the route to successful customer service started a long way before the vendor/customer interface. For example, an organisation’s technology team has a significant responsibility to ensure that the right content, systems, platforms and services are in place to support an ecommerce website – to make sure that
work alongside the customer, to understand their needs and, subsequently, to help recommend the right products or solutions.
Managing expectations Equally important is the recognition that managing customer expectation is a key part of ensuring overall customer satisfaction. This doesn’t mean ‘falling over backwards all the time’, rather, ensuring that the customer understands the relationship he/she has with the vendor. You can have the best customer
before they become a customer issue; but if that’s not possible, then the customer service responds in a positive, and bespoke manner). World class customer service needs the right people, with the right approach and commitment, and who are proactive. In another example, call wait time might be used as a measure of customer service. Maybe it would be better to turn this around and measure the number of calls answered? Better still, it just might be worth understanding why the calls are being generated in the first place. Look at what’s going wrong and address this issue.
One of the participants explained how, previously, the business had had certain people in customer service/technical support to deal with specific topics, but, following a reshuffle, they had decided it would be much better for all of their call handlers to deal with all topics for a specific group of customers, so they could build a relationship with those customers and expertise with their product/ services..
Culture and process In seeking to improve an organisation’s customer service, it’s vitally important to look at the existing internal culture and processes and to understand how these might need to change to help meet the objective. Do employees really understand the importance of customer service and their role within it? And do they understand how they need to explain certain actions, or process changes, to the rest of the organisation and/or outside customers?
the customer has a good user experience, particularly where these sites offer a self- service model to end-users and customers. However, there was a general view that this self-service approach was it is not seen as offering a high level of customer service. No matter how well a website might be designed, there will always be ‘gaps’, where a customer does not know where to go to get what he or she wants.
Okay, so buying books or music from Amazon is never going to involve anything other than self-service, but higher value goods sales or a more-tailored sales approach are unlikely to be carried out to optimum effect via a web portal alone. As one participant explained: “We won’t go self-service entirely, as we generate massive amountsthrough our service support teams.” As several of the participants explained, this personal approach allows the organisation to
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service team in the world, but a vendor can still be battered if there is no clear customer expectation. In other words, if the customer has different expectations to the vendor’s the customer service team, then it’s unlikely the two will be equally content with any outcome. For example, in an IT environment, the technical support team might aim to answer any query within, say, half an hour, but if the customer expectis a response in half that time, they’ll be dissatisfied, even when the support team thinks it’s doing a great job.
One participant made the point that customer service is not so much a function of the business, but more a behaviour. That is to say, there’s ‘automated’, reactive customer service (someone raises an issue, and the customer service team responds) and then there’s real, proactive customer service (ideally, issues are spotted and dealt with
In terms of the customer service culture and process within an organisation, there is no escape from the impact that people have. There was healthy debate as to whether people can be taught to understand customer service and recognition that it’s much easier to have people with the right skills and attitude in place. That said, there was agreement that much can be done to change behaviour, via specific training courses, and also by helping individuals to understand how their behaviour might impact on the immediate customer, other customers, the organisation, work colleagues, and the individuals themselves. Most obviously, by ensuring that people value what they do.
Understanding the right approach to any particular situation is very important. In the case of a holiday website, for example, it might be okay to produce a scripted response to an event that has taken
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