The Service Doctor Is In!

QUESTION:
I need help getting my senior executives to care about customer service. They give lip service, but when I ask for a training budget, all I get is an empty stare. How can I get their interest?

ANSWER:
One of my favorite TV commercials was the IT guy challenged to “describe the project in language the CEO will understand.” He thinks for a moment and says, “For every buck you put in you’ll get two bucks back.” I wish calculating the value of customer service improvement were that easy. The link between customer service and financial improvement is well-proven. Click here to view the Customer Service Bottom-Line Calculators.

There is also some interesting recent research by the Association of National Advertisers, in conjunction with market research firm Guideline, that studied the importance of brand as well as the factors that contribute to building or destroying brand equity.

Research highlights:

• Seventy-five percent said brand equity is “very important to their company’s success.” That’s across the board — whether their own brand is currently rising or failing.
  
  
• “Customer Service” was ranked the second most important driver in building brand equity. Only “the product itself” was more important. Ironically, most customers consider service part of the overall product, giving service even more weight.
  
  
• “Customer experience / satisfaction” was also ranked the second most effective measure of brand health, behind only asking the primary question of, “Which brand do you prefer?”
  
  
• Despite their answers on effective measures of brand health, most companies don't actually use “customer satisfaction” as a top measure, preferring instead less effective measures such as revenue, market share, and brand preference. The gap between responses to these two questions suggests a short-term focus by most companies.
  
  
• There is no consensus about which function is responsible for building brand equity, though the Marketing Department gets named most often. Customer-facing departments, such as Sales, are named only nine percent of the time, even though the same respondents felt that the service provided by Sales and related functions is the #2 most effective driver in brand equity.

So here are three things to think about when describing your customer service improvement goals in language your executives will understand.

• Service improvement can start to be achieved the minute learners complete training. Even so, building a brand of service is a long-term investment—just like building a brand based on anything else. Brand equity is not built in a single fiscal quarter. But if you never start, you never get anywhere.
  
  
• If, as so many believe, customer satisfaction is an effective measure of brand health, then it should be tied, along with other measures, to manager performance goals.
  
  
• Just as Marketing can't singlehandedly build your brand, a department called Customer Service can't singlehandedly improve your customer satisfaction. It takes alignment across functions to create a positive, memorable customer experience. Investments made by one function must be leveraged by others for maximum impact.

FYI, you can download the research report and Webinar (“Brand Deterioration: How to Identify, Measure and Respond,” June 2007)
for free directly from the publishers at

http://www.guideline.com/index.html