Customer Focused: Start with Customer Service

One of the basic principles of Customer Centricity is service. Because? Service is taking steps to care for another person. More importantly, it is taking action to create value for another person (Ron Kaufman). It is how you add value to others and, in the process, gain more from yourself. In most cases (though not on purpose), people feel good about providing a service to others, since doing so naturally implies a positive feeling within themselves. In essence, service is a spirit of altruism. It’s not just a procedure to follow, but a mindset of determined commitment and proactive communication that leads to productive behavior.

Let’s define Customer Service.

Wikipedia defines customer service as the act of serving customers’ needs by providing and delivering high-quality, helpful, and professional service and assistance before, during, and after their requirements are met. One of my favorite customer service (CX) gurus, Michael Falcon, defines it as “one action within a complete customer experience, and to achieve a great experience, every touch point, from start to finish, must be exceptional.” Note that this definition of Customer Service gives rise to its particular ingredient, “touchpoint”, which means, every point of contact with a customer (face-to-face, phone calls, emails, ticket check-ins, etc.) .).

On the other hand, Turban (2002) defines Customer Service as “a series of activities designed to increase the level of customer satisfaction, that is, the feeling that a product or service has met customer expectations”.

Apparently in these concepts given by the experts, common factors in Customer Service emerge: action/delivery, attention and satisfaction of customer needs. Additionally, there is frequent use of superlatives such as exceptional, excellent, of the highest quality, and the like.

In a nutshell, Customer Service is any action at all customer contact points, where we deliver our knowledge and skills to customers to meet their needs and expectations in an excellent way. It is the cornerstone of a customer experience (CX) strategy. It’s a commendable balance of service delivery (including best practices and agent expertise) and satisfying customers at a cost. It is about how an organization delivers its products or services in the most humanly satisfying way, as pleasant as possible.

What kind of service is needed then? Answer: We need superior service at every touch point, because “good is not good enough anymore.” To quote Ron Kaufman once again, “What was good enough for yesterday is not good enough for today. What is good enough for today will not be good enough for tomorrow.” This is so because of the rapidly changing business world. It is very important to keep climbing the service level ladder to keep up with the competitive environment. Being close to your customers and really anticipating their needs, as even their wants and needs change rapidly as well. “The business world is always unpredictable,” as they say. This gives us all the more reason to get even closer and get to know our customers even better.

With ever-increasing standards, how can we provide excellent or superior service? As mentioned, there surely needs to be a great performance balance between the product (technical or otherwise) and the experience (relationship aspect of interactions with our customers). In addition to this, we must make our customers a priority. A critical component of Customer Centricity is a customer-centric mindset (or for some people, “customer-first mindset”). Focus on them as people and not as a problem to create a satisfying human experience. Superior/excellent customer service can not only result in Customer Satisfaction, but even more Customer Loyalty, the ultimate reward of Customer Focus. Without a doubt, first-rate service creates loyalty and a return customer, which is our goal in business.