OPPapers.com

Customer Relationship Mgmt

Chapter 1:

What is CRM?

What's So Hard About Customer Service?

One person's excellent service may represent barely adequate service to someone else. What impresses one customer may make absolutely no impression on another. To complicate matters, what a customer believes to be good service in one context may be unacceptable in another situation or at another time. Service is perceptual; it is individualized; and it is situational. So how can you figure out what customers want from you in terms of service? The kind and level of service that you must deliver depends on who the customer is, what her expectations are, what experience she has had with you and other firms, what your strategy is and what role customer service plays in its delivery—along with a host of other things.

Many managers and executives are uncomfortable with this notion of variable service delivery; they would much prefer to be able to pin down service and to be able to standardize it so that it can be consistently delivered. But I don't believe service should be the same for everyone. In fact, the value of service as a relationship-building tool is its customizability. Simply out, some customers require and deserve better service than others. In some situations, you will want to be able to provide service that will impress customers so as to make an emotional connection. Whenever your employees can say to a customer, "Let me take care of that for you," you are delivering a higher level of service than the customer was expecting.

Yet customer service gets far less attention than it deserves in many companies, simply because managers do not realize or accept its importance in influencing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Many view customer service provision as a cost, rather than an investment. Many spend a great deal of time looking for ways to reduce that cost, without appreciating the impact it has on the customer's feelings toward the firm.

At the same time, managers tend to...