Poor customer service isn’t a headache just for consumers; it’s a problem that vexes senior managers too. Balancing the trade-offs between the cost of services and the customer experience benefits they provide is difficult. Ensuring that frontline workers can efficiently and consistently execute service offerings across a far-flung organization is harder still. Along the way, many companies lose sight of what makes human beings tick—for instance, by overlooking well-known principles of behavioral science when delivering services—and thus unwittingly predispose customers to dissatisfaction.
At the same time, the customer service landscape is changing as social media and new mobile phone technologies give companies unprecedented access to data on customer interactions, while the technologies are changing the nature of the interactions themselves—for example, by amplifying the speed and impact of customer complaints.
Three questions
Against this backdrop, some organizations are making strides in the design and delivery of services. By focusing more thoughtfully on the human side of customer service, these companies are lowering costs by 10 percent or more while improving customer satisfaction scores by up to 30 percent. In this article, we’ll look at three such companies—a provider of cable-TV and Internet services, a technology company serving small and midsize businesses, and a car rental company. From their experiences, we’ve distilled three interrelated questions that CEOs and other senior executives should ask themselves before they introduce new services or conduct a reality check on the health of existing ones. Taken together, the questions can help spur productive conversations among top-team members, raising the odds that a company’s services will be both efficient and effective.
Read the rest of this article by John DeVine, Shyam Lal, and Michael Zea at https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/
