A few years ago, Philip Crosby wrote a bestselling book, QUALITY IS FREE.
Countering the perception that producing flawless products is expensive, Crosby demonstrates that the savings achieved, especially in manufacturing, by doing something right the first time and avoiding recalls and repairs, is an effort that pays for itself.
In the same spirit, I’m here to shout from the rooftops that CUSTOMER SERVICE IS FREE.
This is to counter a growing and debilitating belief that providing services, especially through human beings, is an expensive, unnecessary and old fashioned accessory when technologies like the Internet can be used to provide information and promote much cheaper self-help.
Companies are dismantling their customer service staff, in some cases having outsourced them at shockingly higher cost (30% higher according to a Gartner Group study), but with diminished quality.
There is a fundamental misperception about service that confuses our thinking and leads to shrinking training budgets and the evisceration of service personnel, everywhere:
Accountants, operations officers and the companies they serve have mislabeled customer service as a COST.
The implication is that a dollar invested in a person who answers questions and calms concerned callers earns substantially less than a dollar in repeat business, referrals, additional sales, positive PR, and employee satisfaction.
This perception has never been conclusively proven.
There simply aren’t many studies that even attempt to assess the impact that customer service has on the bottom line, whether it’s the effect of an individual representative on their customers or the impact that a company’s service program has on retaining and improving its customer base. customer base. , or effects service is responsible for producing across an industry or the economy, as a whole.
We see many claims that “it’s 6 times” or “8 times” or “10 times” more expensive to put a new customer on the books than to retain an existing one, but how many companies have customer satisfaction monitoring techniques that capture the events and say specifically, “Emily saved this customer, whose expected lifetime value to our company is X dollars, by using an effective protocol for handling customer transactions”?
Less dramatically, how many companies track what everyone seems to say is the Holy Grail of service, customer loyalty? More specifically, can your organization accurately predict which of today’s customers will stay with you and which will leave, before it’s too late?
As rare as they are, such metrics can be found, and we need to develop more of them.
For example, my TEAMASURES(TM) or Telephone Effectiveness Assessment Measures(TM) monitor customer transactions for what we call “Re-Engagement”. This is a commitment, or its equivalent, that a customer will return to do additional business with us.
This DECLARED INTENT, DISCREETLY AND WILLINGLY OBTAINED FROM THE CUSTOMER, operationally defines Loyalty, allowing it to be deliberately evoked, tracked, monetized and rewarded for both the customer and the service representative who generates it.
Without devices like TEAMASURES and the systematic thinking, research and investment they represent, customer service departments and service providers in general don’t justify their existence and quietly disappear.
In this sense, not appreciating that customer support is free is the costliest customer service mistake of all.