Customer satisfaction needs to be THE leading indicator for a today’s company health.
In today’s high speed world, total sales & market share signals are insufficient and is seen by leaders as lagging indicators because they don’t necessarily give the organisation time to react to disruption. There is growing focus on customer satisfaction signals as a far superior leading KPI.
The future is happening now, and technology disruptions are moving in at speed. Performing the status quo well is necessary but not sufficient anymore.
What follows are brief dot point highlights of elements of great customer service and its foundations.
Competitors are sharpening their saws in all 4 pillars of competitive strategy, with advances in ICT
- Innovation (leapfrog self or competitors)
- Differentiation (product, service and/or feature variety, not offered by competitors)
- Operational effectiveness (lean internal operations; make company more pleasurable to do business with)
- Cost leadership (lowest cost offerings)
Move from a one to many economic models to many one to one ~ I & D
Transforming from internal capability, to cloud, to true-pay-per-use+performance
~ O & C
Big Data & Analytics:
High end data research (data scientists)
Social media management
Data analytics democratization
Internet of Things
Digital Halo Codes ~ I, D, O & C
Primary focus of all these?
Genuinely understanding & serving THE CUSTOMER (not as a vague sub-group but as distinct individuals) beyond their expectations
1 What is first class enterprise grade customer service?
1.1 Common perceptions
Great enterprise grade customer service is often misunderstood, yet so vital to business survival
What it isn’t
- Merely acceding to all demands, being a customer doormat
- Merely being very friendly and polite; suite up, perfume and a great smile
- About following the same processes religiously
- Quick fixes to make people happy for the moment
- Only a front-line sales or support concern
- Unrealistic notion of customer having to use company’s service
- Customer is always right, even when they’re wrong (debatable)
What it is
- Ultimate customer experience – from interactions to value provision
- Understanding true customers’ perspective of value, not what we guess is their perspective
- Knowing the customers and their competitors intimately, or better than themselves
- Taking and travelling with the customer on a win-win journey
- Full service value chain affair, from front-line, to the entire servicing organisation
- Intricate knowledge own and competitors’ services and / or products
- No boundary of “us” and “them”
- Managing expectations against reality of situation
- The next process is my customer
- Projection of confidence, compassion & executive presence
- Professional, tailored communication
- Business sense, excellence organisational navigation skills
- Sound judgement, ability to simplify complex
- Isolating problems, quick thinking interim workarounds; resolve operational fires plus handle tactical issues and devising strategic shifts
- Identifying opportunities & treats, knowing developments in research and how it can disrupt businesses
- Champion of customer advocacy, service delivery and their associated tools & techniques
Customer Advocate & Service Delivery Managers then become THE vital roles, often needing mastery of change, EQ-IQ balance, business & IT acumen, executive presence, firm grasp of service economics and a high level of maturity in dealing with the broadest range of stakeholders. It is in many ways, a marriage of sales, marketing and technology.
1.2 Customer advocacy
Customer advocacy is a specialized form of customer service focus where every employee in a service demand chain focuses on what is best for the customer. It is a change in a company’s culture that is supported by customer-focused customer service and marketing techniques.
1.3 Service Delivery (Framework)
Service delivery is an “outward looking internal capability” where a set of principles, standards, policies and framework used to guide the design, development, deployment, operation and retirement of services delivered by a service provider with a view to offering a rewarding service experience to a specific user or user community in a specific business context
1.4 Customer obsession
6 tiers of obsession
3 Customer obsession tiers
- know immediate people-technology-process interplay
- know organisation wide operating model
- know the wider industry (SWOT)
3 Self obsession tiers
- know immediate people-technology-process interplay
- know organisation wide model
- know industry (SWOT)
Sun Tzu Art of War:
Know yourself and know your “enemy”, every battle fought, every battle won.
1.5 Supporting pillars
- ITIL qualification suite
- COBIT & TOGAF
- Lean, TQM concepts & service economics
- P3O, PMP-PMBOK, PRINCE2, Agile concepts (DSDM Atern in particular)
- Geography, languages & culture
- Infinite curiosity
2 Road to Service Excellence
2.1 Begin with the end in mind – what’s the end game?
Profile of a loyal customer (emotional bond)
- Stays with company
- Buys more as company introduces more products
- Upgrades existing products
- Talks favourably to others about the company
- Pays less attention to competitors
- Less sensitive to price
- Offer products / service ideas to company
- Cost less to service than new customers because transactions become routine
2.2 Tools, models & concepts
Information input tools
Structured:
NPS – Net Promoter Score
CVA – Customer Value Analysis
SIP – Service Improvement Plans
OSR – Operational Service Reviews
MSR – Milestone Service Reviews
GNS- Good News Stories – External
GNS- Good News Stories – Internal
SER – Service Excellence Recognition (Employee to employee)
Unstructured:
Social media
Digital halo from customers’ “operating theatre”
Strategic & tactical models:
CSS – Customer Service Strategy
CEM – Customer Experience Model
RDM – Relationship Data Model
CSTC – Customer Service Tailoring (“one to many” to “many one to one”)
Customer VV matrix (Value vs. Vulnerability)
2.3 Sustainable Quality concepts (more to come, Lean, Six Sigma, TQM)
How do we define base and anticipated quality standards through out the service provision and consumption value chains?
Note: The ideal environment is a “zero entropy” environment, when every breath, step and heartbeat of all employees are geared towards a directed customer excellence activity.
TCOQ (total cost of quality)
Costs of control (Costs of conformance)
- Prevention costs – from efforts to keep defects from occurring at allQuality planning
Statistical process control
Investment in quality-related information systems
Quality training and workforce development
Product-design verification
Systems development and management
- Appraisal costs – from detecting defects via inspection, test, audit
Test and inspection of purchased materials
Acceptance testing
Inspection
Testing
Checking labor
Setup for test or inspection
Test and inspection equipment
Quality audits
Field testing
Costs of failure of/to control (Costs of non-conformance)
- Internal failure costs – from defects caught internally and dealt with by discarding or repairing the defective items
Scrap
Rework
Material procurement costs
- External failure costs – from defects that actually reach customers
Complaints in warranty
Complaints out of warranty
Product service
Product liability
Product recall
Loss of reputation
2.4 Service Performance Economics
CPA – Customer Profitability Analysis
ABC – Activity Based Costing
CLV – Customer Lifetime Value
2.5 Today’s Changing Role of ICT – from being a utility / cost centres to strategic asset
IT used to exist as a utility– Simple metrics, merely digitizing things and doing things faster
Automation trap – automate processes and make it faster = Not right!
Well financed IT systems are not just integrating systems and automating processes.
Underlying business / operational processes needs to be examined, in the light of the latest advances in IT; otherwise, we could be taking a potentially bad way of doing things and making it twice or ten times faster.
It is no longer sufficient for IT to align with business. IT must now be INTEGRATED with business.
A professor from Wharton, David Wessels gave this account of Delta airlines . .
“.. Airlines like Delta understand this approach and have added such features as automated re-booking for passengers who miss a connection. Under the system, ticket-holders can swipe their original boarding pass through a gate reader, which will automatically produce a new boarding pass with the passenger’s new flight information and seating assignment on it. The automated system reduces required headcount while simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction. “This is an example of technology being identified and carefully considered before any action was taken,” says Wessels. “It saves time and money for the airline while aligning the company’s financial objectives with those of its customers..”
The future is happening now, and in a winner takes all third age of computing (where Information Technology grows up, meets Engineering Technology, and gets married), many organisations are scrambling to make sense of what’s all this huh-hah about transformation and lightning change, as companies like Kodak, Borders, Classifieds, newspapers all over the world, traditional television starts to face their extinction event, or perhaps, are already extinct.
Whilst the power of ubiquitous computing starts to de-institutionalize collaboration, one by one of our 300+ years old way of producing goods and services under the burden of traditional brick and mortar, are being made extinct; mega hotel chains, accountants and doctors may be the next in line as the tsunami moves at full speed to transform almost every industry, including military & governments.
In amongst these excitements, the notion of customers and customer service has changed because we are moving from traditional one-to-many marketing paradigm to a combination of that with increasingly many one-to-one customizations, with technology as critical leverage.
In summary, I think first class enterprise grade customer service is a mandatory requirement for any organisation to not only survive but to thrive and ride this exciting 21st century tsunami of change.
Published with permissions by KK Ong
