February 2006

Why is customer service so hard to get right?

Posted by Grant Brewer on 01 Feb 2006 | Comments (0)

Poor customer service seems endemic in some organisations no matter what their strategy says about their commitment to service quality and their desire to focus on customers.

Strategy is about truth and keeping the truth in strategies is as important as the actual message — there is not point in making your strategy so aspirational that it departs from the reality of your organisation and its customers. Both your customers and your staff will see through it. So don't include things in your strategy about the importance of the customer if your senior executives have never been out to see or meet with a customer; and don't put customer service in your strategy if you're not taking it seriously, measuring your performance and continually looking to improve it.

Customer service is only a competitive advantage when your organisation's people actually live it. Your customers need to feel it. Almost every organisation includes some idea about customer focus or the desire to achieve high levels of customer service quality in their strategy. What separates the great organisations from those at the back of the field is their ability to actually execute on this vision. This requires that they embed an ethos of service in their business — and there are not that many organisations that are able to get this right.