Business Success Through Service Excellence
Chapter 2, Customer Intelligence
Discover tools for customer intelligence and get tips for using customer intelligence in a service strategy with this chapter excerpt. Learn what factors impact customer value and discover how customer intelligence can be used to define customer value.
Customer service excellence: Six tips in six minutes
Home: Introduction
Tip 1: Using customer intelligence in a service strategy
Tip 2: Improving customer service with effective business processes
Tip 3: Employee satisfaction and customer service excellence
Tip 4: Building a service strategy with organizational leadership
Tip 5: Change management in a customer service strategy
Tip 6: Customer service excellence best practices
Businesses should consider these questions when evaluating what role customer intelligence is playing in the customer service strategy:
- We encourage and act on feedback from customers.
- We understand the drivers of customer satisfaction.
- We are recognised as innovators in our market.
- We build long-term profitable relationships in our chosen markets.
- We monitor and track customer retention and repurchase intention.
An "outside-in" approach to strategy development means eschewing
a reliance on management intuition to "know" customers and "understand"
what they are seeking, and developing instead a curiosity about
seeing matters from the customer's perspective. In some cases, that
can mean seeing things from the customer's perspective.
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| These chapter excerpts from the book Business Success Through Service Excellence, by Moira Clark and Susan Baker, are used by permission from Elsevier Publishing. Published by Butterworth-Heinemann, a division of Elsevier, 2004. |
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There are factors that maintain value for customers. These are the
"hygiene" factors, or the core features and attributes that all competitors
must offer to be considered players in a particular marketplace.
Surrounding these are the "value enhancers." These are the key discriminating
factors that set the organization apart from competitors
in the eyes of customers. Occasionally, these factors may be "adopted"
by customers and become talking points, creating great word-of-mouth
marketing. Organizations offering value enhancers will build
market share quickly, rearranging the competitive forces in the
marketplace as they do so.
The third set of factors to be identified through customer intelligence
systems are those that diminish and destroy value in the customer's
eyes. Put simply, these are the "turn offs" for customers. Once
identified, these order losers should be eliminated from the offering.
Having identified the various components of value that factor in
the customer's perception of value, the organization then needs to
understand their exact meaning for customers. These may be
described by customers in terms of the features and attributes of a
product or service, but managers need to understand precisely the
nature of the benefits that these features and attributes deliver. In
some cases, they may offer higher level, intangible benefits that satisfy
certain personal values or business goals (see Figure 2.2 of this chapter). This is
where customer satisfaction surveys need to be focused if they are to
pick up meaningful data.
Customer intelligence, then, enables the organization to define value
from the customer's perspective. It provides a means of identifying
underlying sources of customer motivation. This needs to be set
within the wider socio-economic environment so that organizations
are alert to trends that may impact on customer motivation. It is also
important that organizations appreciate that perceptions of value
shift over time and what were once value enhancers with a certain
group of customers can quickly become the hygiene factors. Organizations
that fail to appreciate this can find their customer satisfaction
ratings take a nosedive.
Download the rest of this chapter on customer intelligence.
