the
innovative LEDGER
An e-Newsletter from The Innovative Edge™ Inc.
Vol.
7, No. 10 - October 2007
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Customer Service: A Love Story
By Jeff Govendo
I've
just read an article in Fortune Small Business whose title asks the
searing question, "Do Your Customers Love You?" It's
about the advantages of having great customer service if you're a
small to mid-size company, and the threats to your success if you
don't.
The
story is replete with the obligatory horror stories of lost orders,
late shipments, defective products, abrupt and incompetent service
reps, angry customers with no one to vent their frustrations to, and
so on. In one incident, a desperate customer drove to the offending
party's headquarters with a DVD recorder in hand and proceeded to
grill the CEO, Mike Wallace-style, about repeated broken promises.
He then put the whole encounter on YouTube for the world to see.
While
the major portion of this article highlights several innovative examples
of excellence in serving the customer, the subtext is that service
in general is pretty bad and getting worse. It cuts across industries
and affects customers of all stripes, from the first-time buyer at
an e-commerce site to passengers sitting on the tarmac for hours without
so much as an extra bag of mini-pretzels to sustain them.
What's
so disconcerting is that it’s hardly news. As I read the piece,
recounting some of my own personal experiences to add to the those
cited on the pages, I couldn't help wondering if I hadn't read it
before. Was it about a year ago? Five or six? Ten? Come to think
of it, I remember reading articles about the “crisis” in
service quite some time ago... during the Reagan administration!
Poor
service seems to be the business problem that just won't go away.
In the '80's we heard about how total quality management (TQM)
would ferret out the root causes and "empower" employees
to make customer-centered decisions, fixing the problem once and for
all. In the 90's, we were going to re-engineer the company and start
from scratch with the customer at the top of the food chain. In the
early part of this decade, new customer relationship management (CRM)
software promised to do electronically for customer service what our
overworked minds couldn't seem to keep track of.
Yet
here we are in 2007, and a major publication is advising businesses
it's a good idea to have a customer service phone number on their
website. Or that the CEO should have "regular contact with customers."
Why
is it that when companies come upon, say, a new technology that produces
more widgets faster, or a new raw material that lowers manufacturing
costs, there's little question it will be adopted permanently, or
at least until something better is found? Yet improving customer
service for so many companies still seems like a passing fad - the
initiative du jour - favored only until cost pressures displace it.
That,
in fact, is the issue, isn’t it? Although most of us instinctively
know that great customer service translates to more profits eventually,
to a spreadsheet it only looks like a drain on the bottom line. When
your strategic horizon extends only as far as the next quarterly report
– as is the case in so many companies – customer service
as a cost center is likely to be among the first targets for cutbacks
in lean times. And there’s nothing more damaging than setting
high customer expectations, only to let them down.
The
Fortune article (Oct. 2007) is actually quite good, describing a number
of innovative approaches to customer satisfaction that have paid off
well in customer loyalty. But I think the title is backwards. Instead
of wondering if our customers love us, we should be asking if we
love our customers.
Enough
to stay with them when the times get tough.
