How Can I Help You?

Debashis Sarkar

Description

Customer is king. With rising consumer awareness and cut-throat competition, it is important to provide services which are differentiable and memorable for the consumer. With a ring side view to customer service, Debashis Sarkar-author, thought leader, and practitioner, who has held leadership positions with Unilever, Coca Cola, ICICI Bank, and now Standard Chartered-shares valuable observations about customer service excellence. How Can I Help You? hands you the strategies and tactics to retain and nurture your customers by laying down the five major pitfalls to be sidestepped while dealing with customer service. Richly illustrated with case studies and examples, this book is an essential read for every modern professional.

Sujets

• Gestion et management
• Entrepreneurship
• Customer service
• Economics

Informations

• Publié par: Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
• Date de parution: 25 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184004144
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2013
Copyright Debashis Sarkar 2013
Random House Publishers India Private Limited Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, UP
Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA United Kingdom
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author s and publisher s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184004144
To my late father and all those who have made customer service excellence a lifelong passion
Contents
Prologue
Introduction
1. Service Demystified
What is service?
What is quality service?
What is quality service excellence?
What is the customer service experience?
2. Strategic Missteps
Strategic Service Intent: The starting point of a service journey
A unified service strategy
Elements of a service proposition
Highlight your offering s USP
High-touch or high-tech service?
Who drives the agenda of service in a company?
Corporate social responsibility
Transparency as a differentiator
Invention not the only way
Tracking customer defection as a strategic imperative
Undermining customer service
The low-cost hurdle
Business excellence models
3. Leadership Missteps
Make quality service the agenda of the board
The top management should ask the right questions
Commitment to service should be all-encompassing
A suitable organizational structure
Withholding bad news
Cultivate customer-centric culture
Customer loyalty
Companies measure customer satisfaction
Misinterpreting zero complaints
4. Customers Missteps
Painting all customers with the same brush
Changing customer needs
A distorted picture
Not understanding what is of value to customers
Customers as a resource
Leverage technology to drive customer engagement
Not ascertaining the implicit needs of customers
Customer service is not one dimensional
Evolving experience components
Avoid intimidating customers
Service recovery as an opportunity
To serve with speed
5. Action Missteps
Basic versus Frills
The customer-onboarding process
Getting into the details
Being attentive
Be accessible
Don t orphan your customers
Telephone as a service channel
Upselling during a service call
Flattering the customers
Service should be all-pervasive
Making a difference
Forgetting the little something extra
Fifteen rules of complaints management
Resonating the brand promise
The call centre pitfalls
Fielding stupid calls
Declare a war on unnecessary complexity
Passing on the buck
6. People Missteps
Customer comes second
Select customer service professionals
Shaping employee behaviour
Building a customer-centric culture
Connecting customer to first provider
The power of fun
Enhancing team-service performance
A healthy organizational environment

Acknowledgements
Bibliography
A Note on the Author
Prologue
S ervice as a concept is not new. However, as products are getting copied and commoditized at a pace faster than one makes a powerpoint presentation, companies have realized that if they have to sustain their competitive advantage in the long term, they need to provide an experience which is engaging and memorable for customers. As a result, companies wrap their core product with a service experience, which connects emotionally with customers. Such experiences make customers happy, not only helping companies to obtain customer mindshare but also get a share of the hard-earned rupees. However, the road to customer service excellence is not easy; if deployment is not thought through and guided well-it can be paved with trials and tribulations.
The reason why companies do not get their agenda of customer service excellence right is not because they do not want to, but because very often leaders do not know what is required to be done to create a service-centric company. Some have all the sincere intentions to create a service company but fail to translate that intention into effective action. In some cases, the service delivery does not adequately match the brand promise. Little do these leaders realize that differentiating a business through service requires many big and small things that need to work in tandem to ensure flawless service execution. This requires getting into details and making sure none of the elements in the service jigsaw, however small, get missed. And this includes both strategic and tactical elements that need to work in harmony to deliver what has been promised to the customer.
Over the last several years, I have had the opportunity to get a ringside view of the ups and downs of service excellence endeavours. As I learnt and unlearnt from these experiences, I captured the lessons in a diary. Over a period of time I realized that these were not just lessons, but treasures that could be valuable to all those embarking on a customer service excellence journey. Though these lessons have been an integral part of all my workshops and service engagements, there has been a demand from my colleagues and students to share these with a larger audience. And this book is a response to that request.
How Can I Help You? may not provide answers to all the ills of service deployment but it does provide some critical learnings, which will be very helpful.
I look forward to your feedback and suggestions at [e-mail]
Debashis Sarkar
Introduction
The Case for Service Experience
W hen was the last time you visited a hospital, a government office, an online store, or took a flight to some destination? Do you remember these experiences clearly? Some you would remember while others may have evaporated from your minds completely. For the ones that you remember, what is it that makes you cherish and even share them with others? Was it the price? Was it the product? Was it the people who interacted with you? Or was it the setting in which you were being served? Whatever it may be, what you end up remembering is the overall experience that you have with any of such encounters. It is the positive feeling generated after the experience, the after thought, that makes you go back to these entities, wishing to experience them again, and even talk about them.
As customers we may not realize it, but what we essentially seek is an experience. When you purchase an apartment, the builder tries to woo you through visually appealing advertisements, the sample flat that you see, the amenities that he provides with the flat, the locational advantage, and the promise of impeccable security, among other things. So what he is trying to do is sell you an experience. And when you walk through the sample flat, you are made to live that experience for a short while.
Today if you have to get the mindshare and the wallet share of customers, the only way to do it is by providing experience. Whatever business you may be in, the most effective way to claim the customer s mind, and in turn garner revenues for business, is through customer experience. Irrespective of the type of business that you may be in or the product that you take to the market, the only way to succeed in the marketplace is to differentiate your offering through service and by providing an experience which the customer likes. Doubting Thomases may proclaim that for a company to sell its commodities, the proposition around experience does not hold true. I can just say that even if your company trades in steel, it can provide an experience which would be important for a customer. We shall discuss later in the book how this can be achieved.
So, how have companies responded to this need to provide the right experience ?
There are companies that have realized the importance of experience, gone ahead and provided it to the customers, and have done it well. The outcome of this strategic choice has resulted in these organizations making substantial gains in revenues. There are others who have tried it but haven t got it right. As a result, they doubt if all businesses can get an edge by providing superior service. And of course there are those who still believe that the domain of experience pertains to certain industries and may not be relevant to their kind of business at all.
A research study conducted by Capgemini in 2010 mentioned: It became evident from the research that focusing on service as a strategy can bring a manufacturer significant benefits, including increased revenue and profits, reduced costs and improved customer experiences. As part of the research we further analysed the financial performance of companies that have a growing and profitable service revenue. 1
Such views have also been endorsed by others, such as TARP Worldwide. A leader in customer experience research and services, the company reported in 2008 from an online survey that: A poll found that 42 percent of consumers who hear about a positive product experience will buy that product for the first time and another 21 percent of those consumers will buy more. The effects of positive WOM (word of mouth) mirror those of negative WOM as 42 percent of consumers who hear of a negative WOM stop buying that product and 14 percent buy less. However, consumers with negative experiences provide more detailed explanations through more channels than those who have positive experiences. 2
If one delves deeper, one would find that customers are not looking for anything out of this world. They just want four things from the organization they do business with:
Understand their needs
Keep the