U/S; 10054 – Identify and Manage Areas of Customer Service Impact 

Identify “touch points” of customers

What is a touch point?

A touch point is defined as all of the communication, human and physical interactions your customers experience during their relationship lifecycle with your organization. It is only loosely constrained: a touch point can occur in different locations and can involve different people. It could include sales agents, customer service representatives, superintendents, project managers, etc. The actual touch point could occur in any number of places: web site, informal location/meeting or sales office. Touch points are important because customers form perceptions of your organization and brand based on their cumulative experiences. Fortunately, you have the opportunity to shape this experience.

Why is this important?

Before you invest time in understanding Touch points, you must first understand your company’s brand promise. For example, if a homebuilder, Acme Homes, is targeting starter homes/first time homebuyers, it may decide to tailor the brand promise around four tenets:

• Excellent value for the money
• Ease of home ownership
• Low life cycle cost
• Family-friendly communities

Identify all customer touch points – map the entire customer experience life cycle from the point of first contact until the last controlled point; when doing this, there are three guidelines:

Only identify touch points where you proactively reach out to your customer. Do not try to anticipate reactive touch points, as these cannot be predicted accurately.

 Touch points should be discrete events. In other words, you could think of them as specific activities that take place during the customer experience. For example, “Schedule Design Centre Appointment”

If a specific task has multiple events, capture each one; for example, the design center appointment might consist of a scheduling step, conducting the actual appointment, and then following up, if required

This activity is cross-functional in nature and its development, so you should plan on having representatives from the appropriate functional areas in the room when you identify all the touch points. Some of the questions to ask the team:

•  How are our homes sold?
•  How are our homes delivered?
•  How are our homes lived in?
•  How is after-sales support provided?

In short, perform a comprehensive trace of your selling and servicing processes to create a simple map of the touch points that define your customer’s experience with your brand. For homebuilders, these are usually clustered around pre-closing and post-closing activities.

Moments of Truth – Definition:

A Moment of Truth is a contract between the company and consumer during which the consumer decides if the company really is consumer oriented. Why is that important? Well, consumers rarely read a company’s customer service policy statement and, even if they did, it would make no difference to their feelings about the company. (Except perhaps inducing some cynicism if policy was clearly being ignored.) So-o-o, the only way a consumer can judge a company is on the basis of contact with it.

What are Moments of Truth?

There are companies with very impressive consumer service policies that are not worth the paper on which they are written. The sad fact of the matter is that, in some companies, the Moments of Truth are not managed properly.

Managing Moments of Truth:

To manage a Moment of Truth favorably, you need to exhibit three qualities: Care and concern you have to prove to consumers / customers that you do personally value their business and that you are prepared to put yourself out for them, by sorting out complicated arrangements on their behalf, for example.

Spontaneity Consumers like the people with whom they are dealing to have the authority and use their discretion to make decisions. Words like, “I’m not authorized to deal with that, and my supervisor is out at the moment. Can you come back after lunch?” are the kiss of death to consumer / customer satisfaction.

Recovery most consumers know that suppliers are people too and understand when things go wrong. If the supplier then tries to ignore the problem, minimize it, pass the buck or blame the consumer, the Moment of Truth has been badly handled. Consumers want the problem resolved quickly and efficiently. If they can see that someone in the company has made a special effort to correct it, they are likely to become more loyal than customers who have never experienced a problem.

How to Handle Moments of Truth:

Companies that handle Moments of Truth well will tend to have the following five (5) characteristics:

• Performance at every contact point is assessed against the consumers’ criteria. This includes, for example, first impressions of the company building / shop / lounge etc., mailings, and standard letters and so on. How to Handle Moments of Truth
• Staff who “own the problem” and regard it as their personal responsibility to see that consumers or customers are satisfied.
• They have clearly defined and well understood crisis management procedures so that staff knows how to handle problems in such a way that the problem is taken from the consumer and replaced with a solution. As one insurance company puts it, if you give them your business they will never make a drama out of a crisis.
• Authority levels facilitate spontaneity and recovery.
• The management style and methods of control encourage staff to use their initiative to serve the company well.

Customer service impact areas of vulnerability are identified and explained. 

Customer service is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase. According to Turban et al. “Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.”

The importance of customer service may vary by product or service, industry and customer. The perception of success of such interactions will be dependent on employees “who can adjust themselves to the personality of the guest, according to Micah Solomon. From the point of view of an overall sales process engineering effort, customer service plays an important role in an organization’s ability to generate income and revenue. From that perspective, customer service should be included as part of an overall approach to systematic improvement. A customer service experience can change the entire perception a customer has of the organization.

Some have argued that the quality and level of customer service has decreased in recent years, and that this can be attributed to a lack of support or understanding at the executive and middle management levels of a corporation and/or a customer service policy. To address this argument, many organizations have employed a variety of methods to improve their customer satisfaction levels.

The Impact of Customer Service on Customer Satisfaction

Loss of Business

About 70 percent of people who take their business elsewhere do so because of poor customer service and lack of human interaction, according to the Customer Service Training Center.

Many of the big businesses in every industry have gotten too big to take care of their customers. They often hire outside customer service companies to handle issues and questions about their products. The problem with this is that these outside companies do not have a personal investment in the companies they represent, so quality of service suffers, and, in turn, customers take their money to competitors.

This is where you can capitalize on customer service. Picking up the slack where the big businesses fall short can make up for the lack of marketing resources and low prices that small businesses battle daily.

Repeat Customers

Businesses, no matter the size, should see every customer as a person making a conscious decision about where to spend their money. They chose you, so it amp; #039;s your job to keep them coming back. Providing exceptional customer service–from hiring knowledgeable employees to implementing a personalized complaints department–goes much further than having the lowest possible prices and less-than-adequate customer service.

Customers will return if they can talk to a real, well-educated person when they call your business phone, according to Small Business Software. Telephone customer service must be quick, polite and end with customer satisfaction. This doesn’t necessarily mean handing out free stuff when something goes wrong, but you can offer partial discounts and gift cards so they will return.

Customers will return if they can visit your website and find a phone number and/or email address on the front page of the site.

Customers will return if your employees are knowledgeable about the products you sell–whether cutting edge technology, competitor’s amp; #039; prices or where to find certain items in the store.

Customers will return if every single one of your employees seems excited about his job and turns that excitement into excellent customer service.

Word-of-Mouth Praise, Criticism

People don’t often sit around talking about the quality of customer service at their favorite or least favorite businesses, but it will come up at some point. The downside to word-of-mouth information about your business is that people are more likely to remember and share a negative experience than a positive experience.

Giving your customer an unforgettable positive experience should be your top priority so they share with family and friends what they experienced at your business.

The characteristics of customer service are identified in terms of their quantitative nature. 

Customer Service Characteristics

Any successful company owner or employees can tell you that quality customer service is a cornerstone to the success of the business. Without a service department that is satisfying customers, loyalty may not form and customers may not return. Poor customer service spreads by word-of-mouth and discourages new customers from trying your product or service. Several characteristics should be present in a quality customer service representative.

Listening Skills

A customer service representative must be able to listen to the needs of the customer. They take notes and summarize the customer’s words back to them to ensure understanding. Instead of planning their answer or retort as the customer is speaking, they listen with the goal of comprehension.

Asking Skills

Those in customer service know that asking the right questions can yield the answers that are necessary to solve the problem or address the issue. Quality questions help to uncover the actual needs, goals, objectives and concerns of the customers so the representative can work to meet those needs and alleviate the concerns.

Responsible

To work in customer service, responsibility is a must. This responsibility is two-sided, as it covers the agents’ responsibility in attendance, service, loyalty and attitude. It also covers the ability of the agent to take responsibility for mistakes and results–to know that their own actions determine the results in customer situations.

Responsive

Each need, question or concern is addressed in quality customer service. Bypassing a question because the answer is not known can leave a customer feeling ignored. Many service-related inquiries are multi-faceted so it is important to fully respond to one inquiry before moving to another.

Knowledgeable

Customer service agents should be completely knowledgeable in the department/product/service for which they are responsible. Along with this knowledge comes confidence, which leads to customer satisfaction. If a situation arises where an agent does not know an answer, he must be willing to admit not knowing, and find the answer or pass the client to a representative that can answer the question.

Complete

A customer service representative should work through a situation to its completion. Instead of being quick to hand off the problem or hesitant in working through a customer’s needs, the agent should be thorough and work through each situation step-by-step until it is resolved.

Timely

Customer service is at its best when it is prompt. Allowing a customer to sit on hold or wait in the store for an available representative is unacceptable. The timely response to a request, question, concern or problem is the first step to a solution. This may not always be speedy, but it should be efficient and thorough.

Accurate

Any information relayed from a customer service representative to a customer must be 100 percent accurate. Whether it is instructions on assembly or performance, or information on warranties, everything must be factual. Along with accuracy in fact, the representative should be precise in the actions performed on the customer’s behalf.

What Can Help Companies Improve Their Customer Service & Gain a Competitive Edge in the Marketplace?

Your customer service must find solutions to customer problems.

If your customers have a positive experience every time they interact with your company, they will develop a preference for buying from you. Such a customer preference can be a powerful competitive advantage. To develop it, you have to improve customer service at all levels of your operations, from purchasing through product support to warranty claims. Achieving a high level of customer service means managing all aspects of a customer’s experience with your company.

Maximize Purchasing Convenience and Accessibility

Improving the experience of your customer’s starts when they decide to buy from your company. Making it easy to purchase your product gives you a competitive advantage, because first-time customers will appreciate how convenient it is and return customers will come back because it was so easy.

Specific steps you can take for retail outlets include providing adequate parking in an accessible location, making sure there is enough staff for help with purchases and checkout, and offering easy credit for large purchases. For online stores, you can provide a simple customer interface and a way of making a purchase without opening an account. Promoting your ease-of-purchase feature increases your competitive advantage.

Control Product Quality

Exceeding the product quality your customers expect helps give you a competitive advantage on two levels. From the customer’s point of view, using a product that needs no customer service is even better than experiencing excellent service. From your company’s point of view, it is less costly to provide excellent service when fewer customers have to call for support and warranty claims. If you want to reinforce your customer relationship after a sale, an online survey or mailed survey with a self-addressed, paid envelope asking for comments on the product may be appropriate.

Offer Seamless Support

Even the highest-quality products sometimes fail or may need technical support. To structure your customer service as a competitive advantage, you have to make it easy to access, quick to address problems and convenient to use. Offering a variety of information sources and access methods, such as email, a toll-free number, website chat and an online forum gives the customer a choice of options.

When a customer contacts you, your representative should have the information the customer expects your company to keep on file, such as contact information, purchase history and information about past calls. Convenient service means the customer does not have to repeatedly give the same information.

Make Service Representatives Customer Advocates

The most important function of a customer service that delivers a positive experience is providing quick and customized solutions to problems. To offer such a service and develop it into a competitive advantage, you have to give your representatives the responsibility to implement solutions that meet customer needs. 
Train your representatives to think of their role as finding ways of satisfying the customers while protecting the company. To fulfill this role, your representatives need the authority to make minor concessions whose cost is the cost of implementing improved customer service. Your representatives, who continuously solve customer problems successfully, develop positive attitudes that reinforce the positive customer experience forming the basis of your competitive advantage.

7 Ways to Stop Satisfying Customers and Start Wowing Them

How well are we doing in terms of customer satisfaction? 

• Focus on the very first customer experience – it’s like being on a first date 
• Always offer a solution – here is how 
• Get your response time down 
• Add Personality to each response on every channel
• Free vs. paid users – see no difference, here is why
• Refund money at all times if asked – and suggest refunding if it isn’t
• Do something unexpected – here are some ideas

Customer Service Management Solutions

Every business wants great customer service—but how, exactly, do your customers define “great?” Allegiance Customer Service Solutions dive into what people have to say about your support efforts. We help you know what people are saying—and give you ways you act on it. You can prove that your great service is part of great business results.

Why Our Customer Service Solutions Work

• It’s tailored to you. Allegiance develops a needs analysis specific to your organization. Then we configure your solution and back it up with industry-relevant workshops and customer service consulting.
• Customer service-specific surveys. Our products are ready to implement now. Uncover insights from both customers and employees using transactional, relationship, self-serve, and mobile surveys.
• Employee feedback. We don’t forget the people your customers are actually interacting with. Employee-specific surveys and web portals complete the customer service loop.
• Case management. Direct customer feedback to the appropriate people. Reports and alerts help ensure support cases are addressed and closed.
• Web feedback program. Give customers and employees an easy connection via web feedback forms. Feedback flows directly through the Allegiance platform to you.
• Text analytics. Text analytics interprets the rich information from qualitative data and puts it in context with the rest of your customer service feedback.
• Social media monitoring. Pick up on customer comments, complaints, and critiques via social media and be able to act on them right away.
• A single system. Not only will you save money and headaches, the proven engage platform ties all feedback channels together. Data Sync even connects with other operational databases.
• Reporting, analytics, and dashboard. Nothing else compares with the engage platform, made famous for its real-time views and enterprise-wide summaries.

What is the definition of “change agent”? 

A change agent is a person who indirectly or directly causes change. For example, a change agent may work within an organization to lead or cause the change in some aspect of how the business is conducted. They may be assigned the role or may assume the role naturally. Some change agent’s surface as leaders, instigators or examples for change in cultural, social or human behavior.

A change agent may initiate change, assist others in understanding the need for change and what is entailed, recruit support, manage the change process and/or assist in resolving conflict. In some cases the agent of change may be a team on a mission. 

Change Agent Roles

 There are at least three distinct roles that change agents play: consulting, training, and research. A manager can and often does perform each of these functions. An outside change agent can perform these activities as well.

Consulting

 As a consultant, the manager places employees in touch with data from outside the organization or helping organization members to generate data from within the organization. The overall purpose is to help employees find solutions to problems through analysis of valid data.

Training

 In addition to performing the role of consultant, the manager may function as a trainer. Here the manager helps organization members learn how to use data to effect change. The manager, or outside change agent if one is used, has a dual purpose as trainer: (1) to help organization members derive implications for action from the present data and (2) to provide organization members with a new set of skills—the ability to retrieve, translate, and use new data to solve future problems. Several companies have hired outside consultants to instruct organization members on how to improve the overall operation of their firms.

Research

Finally and closely associated with the previous role, the manager may assume the role of researcher. As researcher, the manager may train organization members in the skills needed for valid evaluation of the effectiveness of action plans that have been implemented. Furthermore, as part of the overall intervention strategy, the manager will design an evaluation component that can be used in solving not only the current problem but also future problems.

5 Ways to Improve Your Customer Service

1) Let Customers Get to Know You – If you’re running your business from an unknown (or internet-only) location, it makes you more anonymous. This is common nowadays, but adding a “face” or an address to your business could help assure customers that you won’t disappear overnight. You don’t have to rent office space if you don’t really need it; just be upfront about where you operate from and consider ways of contacting customers aside from email. A little personal information can go a long way, and could minimize concerns of accessibility, trust, or safety.

2) Be Available – If a customer can’t get hold of you when they need to, you could lose them forever. We recently changed both our insurance provider and web developer, and the decisions were based on availability and accountability. With the new companies, we get the owner on the phone every time, and they’re there day or night if a catastrophe happens. In our own business, we value face-to-face interaction with customers, which is often a rarity these days. Whether it’s traveling across the country for trade shows or taking time for a quick coffee or Skype session, our strongest relationships are with the customers we know personally and keep in contact with regularly.

3) Specials Services / VIP – Are there special discounts or services you can offer that your competitors don’t? Can you offer something special for existing customers only? Could your services be considered “luxury”? Offering special treatment to your customers will help them to feel taken care of, and it’s also something they might be willing to pay more for. There are so many “bait and switch” offers and promotions “for new customers only”– reward the customers that have been with you the longest.

4) Offer Knowledge – Building strong relationships with our customers is great, but we also get to offer and trade knowledge with them. In our trade, a customer can compare several competing copies of a book online, but they won’t get a conversation about the title’s complicated printing history. When we’re speaking with customers, we spend the majority of time talking about the merchandise itself, trends in the market, and the customer’s own collecting habits. Afterward, we negotiate a deal. A customer can even know more than you do on a particular topic! Take advantage of this opportunity to learn more.

Trade shows are another great way you can offer knowledge to your customers. Organize seminars with expert speakers to draw potential customers interested in your product or services.

5) Offer Community – Bringing face-to-face interactions, special services, and knowledge together could help you to create a unique community for your customers. This could be an interactive part of your website, a weekly or monthly webinar, or an open house at your physical location. Better yet, organize with similar or local businesses to set up an event, street fair, or convention that could draw a large crowd.

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