Is Customer Service only a Cost-Factor?

 >>by Fredrik Abildtrup

Often, employees only focus on making a sale, thereby forgetting to ask the question why the customer buys the product.

The global economy is in a down-turn and especially the finance sector is struggling. Apart from that, especially within the Insurance, Banking, Utility and Telco industry, markets are saturated and products are hard to comprehend and to differentiate from one another. As a result customer loyalty tends to be very low.  

Now, the core question is how businesses can acquire new customers to compensate for the rapid decrease in existing business. In this situation, many companies face an uncomfortable paradigm: either to save money or to earn money.

The decision of what to focus upon requires an understanding of the things that really drive value for a company. A vital aspect in relation to that topic is the development within customer service during the last couple of years, where we have seen an ongoing trend towards automation aiming at decreasing costs by applying new telephone and online technologies. Fair enough, it has to be said that optimization-specialists as well as controllers accomplished to decrease costs when handling a customer. 

But how would the picture look like if the sales department took the lead in customer service?

Customer service does not necessarily have to be a Mecca of complaints and problems. In fact customer service should be considered as a place where customers seek and receive understanding and help for specific products and services. Every customer contact represents the chance to trigger up-sale and to give the customer a good experience. Positive experiences are vital in order to turn “ordinary customers” into loyal customers or even ambassadors of the company. 

It is worth mentioning the USA as the place where the new big mantra Voice-of-Customer was born. In many US companies, the customer status was re-positioned to stand in the center of the business. Customer service was evolved according to what customers really require from products and services. While having a customer centric approach many companies managed to accomplish increased profits through up- and cross-sale as well as customer satisfaction.

Though the following words might sound a bit corny, high-quality customer service pays off in the long run. However, it seems as if many big, highly-complex companies within Europe have lost focus on that matter. Customer service is continuously down-graded to a mere function or isolated department.

Employees within customer service normally receive a relatively low salary. This combined with old and/or complicated IT-applications does not create a good foundation to increase quality within customer service in order to become more customer-centric again.

Especially within the Insurance, Banking, Utility and Telco industry, markets are saturated and products are hard to comprehend and to differentiate from one another. As a result customer loyalty tends to be very low.  

If we take the USA as a crystal ball, we can predict that the winners will be those businesses that accomplish to integrate a high quality customer service strategically within their businesses, thereby regarding every customer interaction as a source of value.

It seems as if more and more companies understand how important it is to focus on their customers. How much advertising bombards us every day, conveying a message that we as the customer are “not just a number”.