Mark Greatrex, Product and Services Director, Lakeview You Asked What makes excellent service?

A decade ago, ‘customer is king’ was an almost universal corporate mantra, yet one observed more often in the breach than the observance.

By contrast, in today’s highly competitive IT markets, products have become more commoditised and, as a result, real differentiation must increasingly come from superior service and support. It might be reasonable to expect as a result that companies would take this area of their operation more seriously and no longer simply pay lip service to customer service quality.

Yet the reality is that there are still too many vendors who, through lack of real commitment, have yet to translate fine words into real actions.

In the software arena, for example, not unsurprisingly perhaps service providers have proved rather better in this regard than software houses, as it is closer to their core business.

The goals and objectives of a software developer will primarily be centred on software creation and the sale of product licenses. As a result, its investment focus is more likely to centre on those areas where the company sees the most direct and immediate return, rather than in delivering service improvement which is harder to justify in terms of measurable RoI.

Right staff, right structure

Yet in general there is a lack of sufficient investment in the people, processes and technologies to provide the level of service support which will ensure a consistent and high-quality customer experience.

In terms of staff selection, companies should place greater emphasis on recruiting people with strong inter-personal and customer service skills. And this should be supported by on-going training which enhances such softer skills, as well as ensuring employees acquire the necessary technical expertise.

Organisationally too, it is essential that the most appropriate customer-centric structures and processes are in place to underpin this. First impressions are crucial and again, in the software marketplace, service delivery can often fall well short of the ideal in that the customer’s initial experience of a provider’s service quality is when their telephone call is taken by a call-logger.

With no product or service knowledge, such staff simply note the contact and the customer is frequently left with the vague hope that the company will call them back at some point in the future, often unspecified. By contrast, with the right customer support staff backed up by the right training, form the outset the customer will have the confidence that their issue will be dealt with in a timely, efficient and effective manner.

The basics of service quality

So, in practical terms, what are the key elements of a truly customer-centric approach likely to make a vendor stand out from the noise?

In setting realistic and achievable customer expectations, central to this is the importance of having a common understanding of precisely what product or service the customer is buying, together with the level of service that customer can expect and at what cost.

• Communication as a three-way process (vendor to client, client to vendor, client to client): No business stands still and both the vendor’s offering and the client’s needs will change, perhaps significantly, over time.

Firstly, the customer should be kept up-to-date with product changes and compliance issues, for example, via newsletters and other marketing communications.

Equally, the vendor needs to be constantly aware of what customers think and want, both informally and more systematically through the use of user groups and regular customer satisfaction surveys. It should also be recognised that customer feedback provides important input more broadly into the product and business development programme.

And finally, the use of customer forums provides a valuable opportunity for clients to

share with each other matters of mutual interest and concern.

• Rapid, ‘first pass’ response: On the one hand, it is important to put together a dedicated team to ensure superior service quality on a non-going basis. (And, in the case of a channel sale, this may well involve staff from several companies in the supply chain.)

Similarly, in responding promptly and effectively to customer issues, vendors should put processes in place to maximise the number of customer calls dealt with at first pass, by ensuring ready access to relevant technical and support staff. And for those calls which cannot be dealt with in one call, it is critical to manage customer expectations and deliver within agreed response times.

• Proactive support: However, it is no longer enough simply to be highly responsive to customer requests. To get ahead of the competition, a vendor must anticipate need, by ‘getting under the skin’ of both the client and their marketplace. And this highlights another corporate truism which frequently does not bear close scrutiny, that is, the desire to adopt a ‘partnership’ approach as the basis for creating long-term client relationships.

This cannot be achieved by, in effect, walking away after the sale has been completed and subsequently providing a purely reactive service. By contrast, it is essential to maintain regular contact with the customer, both pre- and post-sale and across the whole business, as part of an end-to-end, proactive approach which enables the vendor to flush out issues and recommend solutions before they become problems.

In establishing the foundations for a long-term and mutually beneficial relationship, this also has the benefit of ensuring that much of the contact will be positive - in exploring and taking advantage of market opportunities in moving the business forward - rather than just liaising on the more negative aspects of solving a client’s problems.

• Tailored market solutions: The ‘one size fits all’ product or solutions proposition is another dinosaur strategy whose day is past, as solutions-savvy customers are no longer satisfied with off-the-shelf, standard or ‘vanilla’ responses. Yet in defining an effective sales approach, a vendor must not only take into account the particular needs of each sector and company, but also the concerns and level of IT understanding of the individual client within the business.

• Business optimisation: many end-users still think in terms of point solutions for point problems. To provide a truly value-added service, vendors must take a step back and help the customer look at solutions, often linked to other best-of-breed products, which will maximise benefit to the broader business. The key here is to help ensure clients have the best tools available in order that they can make fully informed business decisions.

There is a common denominator here. In many companies there remains a commonly-held, if misplaced, belief that your customers are dependent on you as the supplier. Yet in terms of the balance of power, the reality is very different: with customers increasingly willing to vote with their feet and go elsewhere, vendors now have to work harder than ever to retain existing clients and attract new business.

Typically this will require a sea-change in attitude and ethos across the whole business. In order to achieve this, companies like Lakeview have implemented customer charters, which seek to reflect a company-wide recognition of the importance of customer service.

In encapsulating how every department should manage customer interactions, such charters achieve two important goals. First, they make everyone fully aware of their responsibility to the customer, irrespective of their role or job title. Further, the customer benefits from a unified ‘one company’ response, by ensuring consistency of message and quality of service delivery.

The question remains however: with many, and often conflicting, pressures on today’s business, how far up the corporate agenda should quality of service sit? The answer, in short, is at or near the very top.

Failure to implement effective customer service strategies may not have an immediate catastrophic impact on the business. Yet it is now equally clear that, in a world where ever-more promiscuous customers have unparalleled choice, existing business will inexorably hemorrhage as customers switch to suppliers who show a genuine understanding and commitment to their business.

And so, longer term, the result will be equally devastating.

Lakeview