Improving customer service with effective business processes: Tip #2 |
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| 06 Aug 2007 | Written by: Moira Clark and Susan Baker |
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This chapter focuses on operational effectiveness and breaks
it down into its constituent elements. These five self-evaluation questions can help a business assess customer service excellence potential:
Customers consider us easy to do business with.
We enhance business performance through continuous improvement.
We can deal equally effectively with customers over multiple channels.
We deal with service failures effectively.
We use the web to enhance the customer's experience.
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| Tip #2, Improving customer service with effective business processes, is excerpted from Chapter 3 of the book Business Success Through Service Excellence, by Moira Clark and Susan Baker, published by Butterworth-Heinemann, a division of Elsevier, 2004. |
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Best practice organizations are responsive to customers and their business
processes and procedures give the impression of an almost intuitive
organization. This is where managers and frontline staff appear to
perceive the truth of things without reasoning or analysis. They are
able to put themselves in the customer's shoes and see the benefit of
taking a particular course of action without needing any rational
validation. When this approach is embedded in processes that empower staff to deal with customers in an individual way, then
levels of customer satisfaction rise. Tesco, for example, empowers staff
to respond to legitimate customer complaints by giving them the
authority to replace products or issue reimbursements without having
to refer to supervisors. In doing so, the company demonstrates a
respect for their employees' ability to assess situations and manage
customer relations. Customers, in turn, are made to feel valued and
respected.
Where organizations are able to build a business model around
the insights they have into what it takes to be easy to do business
with, they are then in a position to change the rules of the marketplace.
Understanding these key criteria enables them to redefine the
customer needs the industry is focusing on. Virgin Group is one
such organization that has demonstrated time and again how to
bring radically new products and services into the marketplace
without necessarily being the first to market in a particular sector.
Professors Kim and Mauborgne, from the French business school Insead, use the term "value innovators" to describe organizations that
adopt these sorts of approaches to business. In effect, the competition
is left standing as old sources of advantage are destroyed and new
ones created.
Download the rest of this chapter on customer service and business processes.
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
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These chapter excerpts from 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.
Purchase the book here |
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