BusinessWeek: Customer Service Champs

By Marty Carroll

BusinessWeek has just published its annual Customer Service Champs report and it makes the current issue’s cover story.

The ranking, now in its 3rd year, makes for very interesting reading. Top billing goes to Amazon. It would be difficult to argue against this considering Amazon’s almost legendary attention to elements of the customer experience. However, providing exceptional customer service through one channel is a significantly easier undertaking than delivering even good customer service through many channels.

What is surprising is the number of different industries represented in the list of 25: hotel groups, supermarket chains, auto manufacturers, retail, car rental, etc. It’s encouraging that BusinessWeek identified good practice across so many industries countering protestations that delivering good customer service is impossible in more established cross-channel industry sectors.

The central message from the report is that, despite pressures to cut costs in the current climate, organisations making cutbacks that have a detrimental impact on customer experience do so at their peril. In the words of the author: the tough economy has made starker the difference between companies that put customers first and those that sacrifice loyalty for short-term gain. The accompanying podcast ominously entitled ‘When Service Means Survival’ paints a bleak picture for those who fail to make customer experience a priority.

Organisations all too easily dismiss the need to focus on customer experience when there appear to be far more pressing issues to be concerned with. However, retaining customers should be a primary concern for those hoping to make it through this slump and there is no better way of doing this than delivering a differentiated customer experience.

Offering a better customer experience does not need to be prohibitively expensive either. There’s a lovely little story in the BusinessWeek report from BMW. They introduced wi-fi access at their dealerships with the intention of giving customers a pleasant means to pass the time while their cars were receiving a service. But this move had an unintended side effect: wi-fi provision gave customers a means to be productive in what is traditionally dead time and were therefore far less likely to request a loaner car. The cost of maintaining the loaner cars for the dealership is high while the cost of wi-fi is close to nothing.

The report is well worth a read if only to get an understanding of how some brands are performing the balancing act of providing good customer service while effectively managing costs.