By Carol Hildebrand
New technologies like cloud, social, mobile, and advanced analytics can help companies reinvent customer service as a potent remedy for bland marketing, poor brand recognition, and lagging sales. But according to a recent survey from Forbes Insights, while most organizations embrace the general concept, many still don’t fully understand the commitment required to pull the function out of its roots in the complaint department.
“We wanted to see what companies think of when they consider advanced customer service and how it fits in a general corporate strategy,” says Brenna Sniderman, senior director of research at Forbes Insights. The question is more than academic: The research noted that companies that embed customer service into corporate goals and mission statements tend to grow more and operate more efficiently.
Advanced customer service moves well beyond today’s norm of offering a consistent customer service experience across multiple channels, such as call centers and online chat. Instead, companies are trying to deliver personal customer engagement tailored to each specific interaction. In doing so, companies can build a fertile environment for activities like building brand equity, cross selling, and driving customer loyalty.
According to the report, “Now brands realize that customer service is a great opportunity, especially in this omnichannel environment, to begin a dialog with consumers and to engage and interact with them in creative ways,” said Frank Pettinato, SVP and general manager of “consumer connexions” at Telerx, which provides customer support services to businesses. “Traditional marketing and public relations was push. I advertised. I ran a commercial on television. There was no real interaction. Now in the world of social media, we see two-way communication and, candidly, millennials are expecting that.”
The survey of more than 300 customer service executives found companies in various stages of modernization. The majority of respondents said they were making good progress in implementing modern customer service, while 28% say that they were making excellent progress.
But despite this widespread acceptance, Sniderman said that many companies still need to shift further away from traditional views of customer service. “Many are still looking at it as a post-purchase function,” she said, adding that companies may not fully understand the changes involved in implementing advanced customer service. In particular, the survey highlighted several factors:
1. Customer service needs more organization-wide attention. Only 38% of the companies surveyed said that customer service was an organization-wide strategic goal, meaning that more than 60 percent of respondents were missing out on the associated business benefits noted in the report. Some industry segments were ahead in this regard; nearly half of technology companies peg customer service as their top strategic goal, while more than 40% of telecom companies said that customer service is embedded in their corporate culture.
2. Customer service must grow beyond a customer retention focus. The good news is that most companies no longer considered customer service as a back-office support function, as only 11% reported that serving customers is primarily or solely the responsibility of the customer service department. But many companies still didn’t understand the value of customer service in the pre-purchase process. For example, only 15% considered it a key component of their marketing message or brand. Just 30% of all respondents saw customer service as a brand differentiator, and only 35% saw it as an opportunity to convert prospects or visitors into customers.
3. Omnichannel customer service requires upfront integration. Advanced customer service must present a consistent user experience regardless of the device or channel your customer uses—in fact, customers should be able to hop across channels (think smart phone to laptop, for example) without noticing a difference.
While nearly 60% of respondents said customer support was consistent across all channels, the survey also found significant barriers. For example, 44% cited integration issues, such as the inability to align with existing systems, while 43% said that the cost of implementing new support channels remained an issue. As the survey report noted, “The biggest barrier to making changes to existing channels is ensuring the IT infrastructure enables the functionality needed for each channel and maintains visibility to all channels,” says Christine Nashick, vice president of marketing and chief customer officer for DHL Express US.
4. Customer service performance metrics must evolve. While most companies are giving customer service a more prominent role, performance metrics have yet to catch up. Most key performance indicators (KPIs) still focus on customer retention, as 40% of those surveyed said that they relied on KPIs such as first call resolution, average talk time, and/or net promoter score.
Far fewer are applying growth-related metrics, however. Only 20% of respondents tracked new customer acquisition as a measure of customer service performance, while just 28% tracked and compared sales and revenue growth as a customer service metric.
Customer service is undoubtedly gaining credibility as an important tool to increase profits and engage customers at all stages of the product life cycle—but using that tool well requires significant organizational change. The key is to make sure that your organizational views and strategies support the promise of modern customer service.