Productivity Tools for Your Sales Force.

SMART WAY® SERVICES
Customer Service the SMART Way®

What’s wrong with customer service? Virtually everyone has horror stories about customer service gone awry. A “good” customer-service anecdote is the exception, not the rule. The unhappy stories still outweigh the happy ones.

Too bad. Customer service is too important to business success to be allowed to produce poor results. After all, customers are the reason that businesses exist in the first place.

Customer Service the SMART Way® is a companion to our strategic sales-process program Selling the SMART Way®. Just like Sales, Customer Service is a strategic function that tends to be handled as if it were a tactical one. Your Customer Service organization may be producing less value and less profit than you’d like. Ask yourself these key questions:

• Does your company handle Customer Service as a cost rather than an investment?
• Is the Customer Service function ‘stovepiped’ or disconnected from its internal suppliers (Marketing and Sales) or its internal receivers (Operations, Distribution, etc.)?
• Does management disregard Customer Service’s potential for providing critical customer intelligence, information that could contribute to customer retention, competitive distinction, and innovation?

No matter what the industry, customers want their vendors to provide a ‘seamless’ experience. They want all their interactions, from marketing to after-market service, to go smoothly. If your company can’t do that for your customers, you jeopardize their loyalty, and you might be lowering the potential lifetime customer value.

Customer Service should be the engine that drives sustainability and growth for a business. It is an integral part of the customer Life Cycle, which starts with customer acquisition (the province of marketing and sales), moves through product and service delivery (the province of operations), and places customer engagement, satisfaction, renewal and retention, at its heart.

Customer Service the SMART Way will help you:

• Figure out what Customer Service is for, strategically
• Enhance the customer experience, by learning what it takes to delight the customer and exceed expectations
• Use customer insights and intelligence to improve retention, increase customer lifetime value, and produce innovations in product and service

Like Selling the SMART Way, Customer Service the SMART Way is driven by a series of analytical templates and exercises designed to simplify the identification and creation of pertinent performance metrics, which you can use for the sake of continuous improvement. This approach will enable you to improve productivity by simultaneously increasing profitable income while lowering costs.

You will define performance metrics for the Customer Service environment that include:

• The Ideal Customer Profile
• Definition of performance analytics
• Moments of Truth, critical ways to measure the impact of customer-vendor encounters and touch points
• Methods for encouraging and measuring tighter engagement between customer and vendor
• Cross-selling and up-selling metrics
• Key customer-intelligence data

Customer Service the SMART Way® is a two-day analytical workshop. Ideally, participation should be cross-functional, with no fewer than 10 and no more than 25 participants, representing line customer-service staff, customer-service management, sales, marketing, and product/service delivery.

Post-workshop services include:

• Implementation support: coaching and reinforcement to lock in the new performance management techniques, and learn the skills of continuous improvement, and deploy them across the entire customer-service organization.
• Technology support: interface with your company’s IT organization to evaluate and/or recommend methods for capturing and reporting on newly defined performance metrics.
• Customer 360 Feedback: our unique solution for real-time capture and analysis of the customer experience, using both formatted and unformatted tools to identify and respond to the customer’s experience of your brand.