The WAC Files

Customers benefit from better service. A 360° view will get you there.

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Well, this is of course not a news flash, but it bears repeating. Sellers who consistently deliver excellent customer service gain improved loyalty and more repeat business from established customers.

Another news flash: "Delivering Superior Customer Service" is no longer a differentiator. It stopped being that once everybody put that in their mission statement.

So which are the critical pieces you need to put in place to delivering that excellent customer service? Here's an action plan to get your started, or to improve, or to double-check that you are doing all the right things:

1. Poll your customers - how else would you know how you are doing and take appropriate action? I would caution you to not rely exclusively on customer surveys, but to use other means such as a direct phone conversation and yearly review meetings. Anytime there is a customer event, your internal processes should trigger a follow-up phone call to ask for feed-back on that event, and to probe further on your company's performance across the board.
2. Create and share access to data - there's nothing more maddening to a customer than to be shuffled around to various departments, each time reiterating their information or problem. Provide access to customer data to anyone who enters into contact with customers. Do you need to provide some customers with regular status reports? Make sure that the staff that needs to contribute to these reports can submit their information just once, centrally. And why not go even further and incorporate a customer self-service portal, that allows them to check on progress anytime they want?
   
3. Integrate your data with financial metrics. When we speak of customer service and customer relations, we often think about the 'soft' skills associated with service delivery, customer satisfaction etc. But let's not forget what YOU need to get out of these processes: a deeper understanding of your financial performance through visibility into customers' spending, lifetime value and profitability. Integrating data from financial, selling and customer service transactions give you those insights.
4. Identify At-Risk Accounts. At risk accounts must be identified and dealt with proactively before problems mushroom into full-blown crises and lost customers. This speaks directly to point #2 above, that your customer-facing staff must be plugged in to a 360° view of your customers.
5. Be consistent in your messages. The more employees, the greater the risk that your corporate messages get diluted, or worse, get garbled. Ensure that your staff is fully trained on the messages that reflect the values of your company. It could be as simple as the 'right' way to answer the phone, or standardized email signatures, or much more complex as when dealing with irate customers.
6. Get mobile! On-the-road access to customer data is no longer solely the realm of sales reps. Smart phones enable most staff to be responsive regardless of location. Granted, some may resist the move to be 'always on', and rightly so. But with the right framework, mobility will ultimately result in better performance.

Quick recap

• Provide a single and centralized view of all our customer data.
• Train staff to identify at-risk accounts and create a method to reverse their status.
• Never catch your sales and/or support staff by surprise- if there's troubled news with an account, they must be informed!
• Give your sales and support staff a 360° view of the customer data.