MANAGED SERVICES customer ser vices
THE CLARANET CUSTOMER SERVICE roundtable event was prefaced by a thought- provoking presentation from the Institute of Customer Service’s Sally Duff. She reminded the attendees that, these days, good customer service is no longer a ‘nice to have’ but a ‘need to have’. It seems that we are all expecting more from the organisations we deal with, at the same time as our faith in high profile organisations has been rocked by recent, high profile scandals. In the UK, seventy per cent of all employees deal direct with customers. As business moves from an era of transactional relationships (do business with someone and move on) to one of longer term relationship building, it seems that most employees can have a positive or negative impact on an organisation’s customer service – which, in turn has a direct impact on whether customers come back and/or recommend a business to others.
While there might be no surprise in revealing that the higher the customer satisfaction,
the higher the chances that a customer will recommend a business to others, less obvious might be the fact that internal trust is as important as external. In other words, customers need to believe in a brand, but so do the brand’s employees. After all, if employees are not convinced, it is highly unlikely that they will be doing their very best to sell an organisation to its customers.
Also worth noting is the fallacy that customer satisfaction is a project, with a specific timeline, producing a final outcome before moving on to the next project. Good customer service needs constant attention.
As the business world changes, so do the demands placed on customer service. Face to face customer contact is gradually being replaced (or certainly rivalled) by the online world, and this shift in emphasis demands an understanding that it’s not just the sales folk that are representing a brand but also, for example, the people who pick and pack an
order in the warehouse and those that design websites – both key parts in ensuring a high level of customer satisfaction.
In conclusion, Sally explained that the road to world-class service demands close attention to: Strategy, Culture, People and Process. All are equally important and need to be aligned/integrated successfully if the end result is to be top class customer service.
Customer service – what is it? The roundtable discussion started by trying to define (positive) customer service - a difficult task. One suggestion was: ‘The sense of fulfilment that anyone gets who you have dealt with – how a customer feels at the end of an engagement’. A more functional definition proposed was: ‘The sum total of what an organisation does to meet expectations and to produce customer satisfaction’. Although this raised the question of whether a satisfied customer was ‘good enough’? Or if customer
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