What Is Customer-Centric Service?
In June 2007, in Aptos, California, 16 of CustomerThink's global advisors gathered for our annual Retreat. Each year we get together to discuss the top industry issues, how we can collaborate with each other and how to add value to this wonderful community.
In one exercise, the advisors broke up into groups, based on their field of expertise, to define how leaders viewed customer-centricity, based on their job function.
Here's an outline of how one advisor group at the Retreat defined customer-centric business, from the chief service officer's perspective.
Chief Service Officer
Definition:
A customer-centric customer service organization empowers and enables its people to remedy customers' issues, identifies and fixes the root cause, adds to the company's knowledge pool and, if appropriate, increases value to and from the customer.
Activities:
- Provide channels to access customer service in the most appropriate manner
- Meet customer requirements as they are changing
- Define chain of command for customers to escalate
- Provide techniques and frameworks to be flexible and solve problems: TRAINING
- Provide incentive structure to go above and beyond baseline
- Structure organization to enable self-managed team
- Ensure employees are customers to create community of users outside of company
- Learn best practices from superlative agents and propogate/train-->share with organization
- Provide training to be embedded in culture and behavior
Metrics:
- Balanced Outputs:
- Operational/productivity measures
- Customer (internal, external) evaluations
- Outcomes:
- Improvements --->
- ----------------------------> knowledge pools
This is just a draft, open for discussion in our community.
What's your take on what customer-centric customer service is, including the activities and measurements needed to be successful?
Please add your thoughts below, and together we'll make this a meaningful and useful definition for business leaders.
Thanks!
Bob Thompson
CustomerThink Founder
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Jay Curry
Customer Centric Service
The key point is empowering and respecting "service people" who are often treated like modern-day slaves.
Michael Lowenstein
Customer Centric Service
Centricity can be seen virtually everywhere a company is endeavoring to influence customer behavior - structure, strategy, messaging, and perceived value of products and services to name a few. But, I think that customer centric service is driven, especially, by employees.
Customer centric experience creation, especially in service and support delivery, must relate and link employee perceptions and actions to company objectives, most particularly regarding customer behaviors on behalf of the company. This represents the new reality of optimizing employee productivity, namely connecting to the organization, the brand and product promise, and focusing on delivering value to customers; and it addresses the direct and indirect behavioral linkages between these stakeholder groups.
Making the experience for customers attractive at each place where the company interacts with them requires an in-depth understanding of both customer needs and how what the company currently does achieves that goal, particularly through employee attitudes and predispositions to act. Principally, it requires that companies understand, and leverage, the impact employees have on customer behavior - - how the way they are selected, trained, rewarded, recognized, supported, and guided links to customer actions. We call this employee ambassadorship.
Graham Hill
What is Customer Service?
The list of activities of the Chief Service Officer (groan, not another Chief XYZ Officer) reads like a list of functional requirements for technical customer service. It is alright as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. There's nothing there about the ethos of serving customers.
Work on market and customer-orientation in the early 90s showed clearly that serving customers was as much a mentality as it was a list of technical service capabilities.
Perhaps the omission of the human side of customer service is a sign of the times.
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