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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
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. This was first published in August 2007