Customer Service Nirvana

There are 4 elements that play a major role in driving an organization’s customer service needs. These are

1.    The number of products and services that companies offer, which can range from a few to several thousand

2.    The way products and services are designed which makes them either very simple and easy to understand and use or burdens the customer with the task of deciphering its complexity.

3.    The way organizations are structured to deliver the products and services

4.    The service delivery process itself

How successful you are in servicing your customers comes down to how you organize and design your customer service elements and how well they perform during the customer service process. All these factors contribute to the resultant experience a customer will have either before, during, or after they have made product or service purchases. These experiences can be measured, and the data will expose more about your business than just a customer's sentiment.  

The typical pattern a customer moves through in the buying process is research, compare, purchase, receive, use, repair, re-purchase etc. The ideal for an organization is to create and deliver products and services that are easy to find and buy, are simple to understand and use, and are sold at a price that matches the customer’s anticipated value of use.

If your product or service was the epitome of perfection at all levels e.g., easy to find, compare, buy, receive, use and maintain then theoretically there would be zero need for any customer service operations. Since every organization has some customer service operation, we can conclude that no organization has reached that state of customer service nirvana.  

Customers start their journey wanting to solve some problem or satisfy some intrinsic need. The need could be entirely frivolous or lifesaving and anything in between. They buy products and services to satisfy these needs and what drives customer service demand are the endless questions, issues, problems, and complaints that customers have during this journey.

While the central goal for an organization is to provide great customer service when an issue arises, the central goal for customers is to resolve issues as fast and efficiently as possible when they arise. The two most important measures then are  

1.    Did we resolve the customer’s issue or not?

2.    What was their experience during the process?

Everything else is subservient to these measures. Customer service metrics are there to inform us as to how well or poorly we performed at resolving customer issues and to pinpoint precisely where we need to improve so that those issues do not re-occur. This means that resolving the immediate issue and fixing the cause of the issue becomes the central focus.

To know how well or poorly we perform and where we need to improve, organizations need to become skilled at collecting, managing, processing, and analyzing a wide range of data to gain the critical insights needed to drive directed and intentional change.

Imagine a world where our customers never have issues and therefore never need to contact customer service and now ask yourself what do I need to do to achieve this. How do I design, build, sell, deliver and maintain our products and services to achieve this ideal?  

While we never ever reach the state of nirvana, the journey and the simple act of trying forces us to improve as an organization in ways, we never dreamed we could