Addressing customer service from a strategic perspective, and not just as a set of tactics or tips, will allow you to visualize the great opportunity that a service strategy holds. Opportunity that translates into economic value and sustainability of the business. These 6 changes of focus will allow you to look at customer service in a strategic way and fully exploit its possibilities.
Every day I become more convinced of what is necessary to approach customer service from a strategic perspective, and not only as a set of tactics or tips that can help, but will make you lose sight of the great opportunity that a service strategy holds.
It's not about giving a veneer of service to your operations, making your employees smile, or simply mentioning the customer's name as an artificially learned practice.
The strategic approach to customer service stems from the conviction that customer relationships are the source of your income, and the sustainability of the business. Neglecting them is a sure path to business failure.
In this reasoning, I have found a fantastic author from whom I want to share some concepts. This is John Goodman, in his book "Strategic Customer Service".
There he talks about 6 “clicks”, changes in focus, which you must do as a manager and translate throughout your organization, which will lead you to look at customer service in a strategic way, and make the most of its possibilities.
1. View current customer relationships as essential to the financial health of your organization.
Do you know which of your current clients would be willing to increase the frequency of purchase, or to increase the average value of each one, or to recommend other potential clients?
2. Map the customer's end-to-end experience and adapt the organization to that experience (and not the other way around). Designate someone to manage it or, at least, monitor it.
Are you one of those rigid and bureaucratic organizations, to which the client has to adapt, understand, suffer? Or do you take the initiative by designing your service based on your clients, making their participation easy, and taking into account everything that can help deliver the service with the least effort on their part?
3. Use customer service not only to respond to problems and gather information, but to measure and report the impact of managerial decisions on loyalty and profitability.
Do you have reactive customer service, which simply responds to the demands of dissatisfied customers, trying to recover what could have been avoided before? Or do you take advantage of this contact in a proactive way, allowing the entire organization to improve from the experiences you can capture, capitalizing on new learning?
4. Structure customer service and product development, marketing, sales and operations areas to work together to deliver the right level of service to customers, and delight those who are financially justified.
Is customer service encapsulated in a specific department or area? Or has the culture of service managed to permeate your entire organization, overcoming functional barriers, aware that each person's contribution is irreplaceable, and has an inescapable impact on the end customer?
5. Align the finance area to help you see each contact with the customer in terms of income, loyalty, word of mouth, and risk it creates or dissipates.
Excellent customer service is not just a way to bring happiness to this world. Although this impact is invaluable, both for your customers and for your employees, there is a real impact on the profitability of the organization. Are you quantifying it?
6. Organize service employees, the resources that support them, and the functions that affect the service for maximum speed and flexibility, with few specific rules, doing what is best for the client.
"The culture of service prevents lack of control," Dr. Lescano Duncan told me in an interview we had some time ago. Therefore, it is only enough to lay the foundations well, with few very clear premises. The rest of the rules, many times only provide rigidity and confusion. What are the fundamental principles that you want to guide the actions of your team?
A service strategy can do a lot for your organization. I invite you to join the strategic approach, reviewing and working on these 6 managerial clicks.
