Here are several excerpts that I found particularly valuable from the recent Businessweek cover story, Customer Service Champs:
Providing great customer service is much more than just a job for the front lines or the call centers. It takes coordination from the top, bringing together people, management, technology, and processes to put customers’ needs first. That’s true today more than ever. Technology is leveling the barriers between alpha companies and also-rans, making great customer service one of the few ways companies can distinguish themselves. Retail, online, and phone shopping channels are expanding, increasingly prompting customers to demand a seamless–and painless–experience. Refining time-tested concepts and coming up with cutting-edge ideas is critical for managing rank-and-file workers and measuring what customers think.
In BusinessWeek’s first-ever ranking of the best providers of customer service, we set out to find the service champions, but also to dig into the techniques, strategies, and tools they use to make the customer king. To launch the process, we created a list based largely on brands in J.D. Power & Associates’ database. In addition, we polled 3,000 of our readers, generating a pool of names most associated with treating customers well. We then asked J.D. Power, which, like BusinessWeek, is owned by The McGraw-Hill Companies, to survey customers about the brands that were nominated by readers but not already in its database.
Despite their differences, most of the names on the Businesssweek list share a few important traits:
1. They emphasize employee loyalty as much as customer loyalty, keeping their people happy with generous benefits and perks.
2. They know how to respond when service goes wrong.
4. Helping employees become more empathetic with customers was a common focus.
3. Perhaps the most repeated theme was the need to improve continuously, no matter how many accolades they receive.
For most of us, customer service is an aggravating maze of automated phone trees and scripted voices resonating from halfway around the world. But while offshoring call-center work is still growing steadily, companies are getting smarter about what they send overseas. “I think we’re seeing some backlash,” says Bruce Temkin, Forrester Research Inc.’s principal analyst for customer experience. “Companies are pulling some [more complex types of calls] back from offshore, and in other cases are recognizing they need to invest more in those facilities to give reps more tools and training.”
One encouraging alternative trend, at least for those of us on the other end of the phone line, is “homeshoring,” in which service agents armed with a broadband line, a computer, and a quiet corner in their spare bedroom respond to calls at their homes. Service can be better for customers because homeshoring attracts more experienced workers with more education than do regular call centers. Stay-at-home moms are a big part of the labor pool and like the flexibility and nonexistent commuting costs of the home-based model. That makes them more loyal, keeping turnover lower and experience levels higher. Companies that outsource calls to home-based agents report turnover rates in the 10% to 30% range, compared with anywhere from 60% to 100% in the average call center.
The connection between satisfied employees and contented customers is hardly a new concept: Any business-school student can recite by heart the concept of the “service-profit chain,” which draws the inextricable link between the front line and satisfied customers. But new research from Katzenbach Partners offers an updated metaphor. The firm stresses the importance of an “empathy engine,” which looks at the role of the entire organization, including middle and senior management, in providing great service. The firm stresses the importance of an “empathy engine,” which looks at the role of the entire organization, including middle and senior management, in providing great service. If that engine is thought of as a heart, “the whole company has to pump the customer through it,” says Traci Entel, a principal at Katzenbach Partners who recently studied 13 leading service companies’ best practices. “It starts much further back, with how they organize themselves, and how they place value on thinking about the customer.”
There are quite a number of reader comments from people who were disappointed that JetBlue was not included in the BusinessWeek list, but other then that valid complaint, this article is well written and full of good anecdotal information, check it out!
