According to McKinsey research, customer experience satisfaction scores have been dropping recently in a number of industries. This is due in part to our challenging economy and the closing of stores, reduction in hours of operation, and reduction in staffing of customer facing roles. All items that cut back service levels customers have grown accustomed to in recent years.
This makes improving your customer service levels a competitive advantage in these difficult times. How can consumer businesses make necessary investments in service while facing the pressure on revenues and costs? Research shows that it all starts with challenging your beliefs about service and testing those beliefs analytically. Many businesses find that their assumptions about what customers want are wrong. Taking an analytical approach to your customer experience expenditures can minimize wasteful spending.
Companies that closely manage the customer experience have taken a rigorous approach to resetting service levels and save money while maintaining or improving customer satisfaction. These companies have carefully measured and determined “breakpoints” to find their customers’ sensitivity to service levels. For example, determining that answering a phone call in less than X seconds produced delight, while leaving customers on hold for more than Y seconds produced strong dissatisfaction, saved a company over $7 million in staffing costs. This money was then reinvested to improve other portions of the operation, including the problem resolution process.
Finding these types of savings extends to analyzing expenditures on technology, marketing campaigns, billing, and other customer related business processes. Sophisticated companies that figure out what matters most to customers, eliminate the expenditures that don’t matter, and finance the ones that do will thrive—and may find themselves, when the economy rebounds, with fewer competitors.
