New customer service level takes the lead and drives value to brand loyalty

『Don’t try your loyal customers’ patience, since they are loyal to your brand, they deserve a better treatment.』 This will be my first sentence in Sep., 2008 for you all.

The gap from customer service level to value of brand is not easy to cross for most of companies. To cross the chasm, the process could be long and challenging enough to discourage your investment on it. Is there any short cut towards it? I guess no. Is customer loyalty important and critical to add future competition edge? I vote for yes.

It’s only few months to go for 2008. We have met semantic challenges and have achieved great results on the way to evolve CRM solutions together with our customers currently. We have noticed that there is a new conceptual customer service trend is growing silently. What is that? How did you leverage it to add value to brand ? Or you just choose to miss it.

What’s growing new customer service trend?
Business is no longer as usual for years. It’s getting harder to retain GOOD customers; it’s even more severe to keep distance of competition capability; it’s lesser room for operational cost control; it’s no significant/ new tricks to play in marketing treatments; what else left to develop differentiator?
It’s time for customer service evolution.

It’s always frustrating to see the best customers leaving. Even we have tried hard to re-program a best business term to retain them. They are still leaving with non-negotiable reasons. I was told and heard lots of this recently. Look at the pricing issues, business term issues, or iventory management issues?

There are thousands of reasons to leave if they choose to leave. No matter how good relationship used to be! It’s really heart broken for a sales rep. Under such circumstances, what else you can make it up? It’s not pretty much you can do to be honestly.

The simple and also a non-negotiable answer is to avoid & prevent it upset to your organization up front.

We all know it’s not a best answer to comfort your frustrations. But it is definitely a true answer to see the real clouds.

And how? By using the growing and new customer service trend is exactly the secret weapon to defend your competition. It is to provide a sophisticated customer service system and capability to understand your customer needs before your competitors respond to them.

How to leverage a so-called sophisticated customer service system and capability to add value to our brand? Everything we do will add value to our brand. Question is only about the balance of cost and effectiveness.

A sophisticated customer service system can detect and respond to customer needs timely amongst operational processes. And it’s the differentiator to enlarge your competition distance.

Finally, we return to the core discussion page. Everyone matters customer voice and claims it. But the fact is NOT. Only a well designed operational service center hears customer voice and turns it into customer needs , and properly responds to it.

How to benchmark a well-designed operational service center? It’s actually customer feedback management (CFM). Customer feedback management products normally was featured as below:

• capability to extract and analyze customer data
• align CRM programs
• integration capability of lead and opportunity management
• tools to assist agent to handle complaints timely
• well-routed escalation process included
• …etc

Have I say enough for you? You know what’s baseline (not bottom line) that you will draw for your customer and you by now.Anyway, unhappy customers will defect quietly. When you see customers go next time, hopefully you have done enough for them, even they still choose to leave, but the difference is that you know where and when to win back soon.

Posted by Christina Wang