Celebrating the launch of our upcoming Qual and Big Data
event, Fusion 2019, ESOMAR is excited to announce the launch of our
Qualitative week. Offering a number of specially curated global qual
impact case studies and qual event impressions through the years, keep
an eye out on Research World and our social media channels (#esomar) for
impressions and great content!
And please enjoy piece one from our RW editorial Qual focus below. Many thanks to all that contributed!
–From your Research World Editors.
How your service organisation can be your secret weapon in the battle for business success
The constant chorus urging brands to be ahead of the insights game has reached its decibel peak in our digital age. Invariably, this results in greater demands on the CMO to extract more from each dollar spent on insights and analytics. This intense focus often runs the risk of ignoring a quiet revolution occurring amongst brands – one that is guided by the most intimate interaction with impassioned customers. Compared to the usually stilted way in which formal customer insights are gleaned through intrusive surveys or interpreting comments on digital platforms, a new way of understanding people more naturally seems to have taken root.
Hiding in plain sight, the most natural, obvious and engaged source of customer interaction has now come to fore – Customer Service. Customers are never more passionate and energetic when demanding that their expectations be met.
Complaints have been seen as the dreary preserve of the customer service department – dealing with irate customers is rarely seen as an exciting activity. The new winners of customer ‘love’ and market share have flipped the script on this. Today, savvy brands have turned the Customer Service department into the new font of deep customer insight, to unify organisational purpose, and trigger uncommon innovation.
Attaining this ascendancy has not been a matter of happenstance. The organisations that have attained this, across the brand landscape have been the ones that have deliberately blueprinted a customer service strategy geared to achieve unparalleled customer connections. In our observation across organisations, five key vectors appear to form the catalysts to enabling this.
1. Elevating the role of the service leader, building a service community: most businesses of a reasonable size today comprise verticals and business units separated along the lines of geography or customer segment. While most other functions (marketing, HR, IT) often come together to share learnings and exchange ideas, service functions rarely ritualise this. At the Tata group, the creation of a Service Head community has helped transfer learnings, trigger new ideas and re-wire mindset faster than ever before. More of this is happening across market leaders in every category.
2. Mining service queries to distil consumer insight: service requests and complaints are often subjected to close scrutiny as companies race to douse fires. New age companies have realised that breaking down the customer journey to understand where processes are inconsistent with customer behaviour, presents an opportunity to disrupt the category. The creation of frictionless returns in e-commerce, painless refunds and same day delivery have all emanated from this to reinvent the customer experience and dislodge competition.
3. Creating a digitised service transformation blueprint: Digitisation may be more synonymous with the front end of customer marketing and demand generation but it is beginning to reconfigure the customer experience post-purchase as well. By drawing up a digitisation blueprint for the service organisation, brands are now using the inevitable interaction between customers and the service department to trigger strong customer referrals. In the hospitality and restaurant industry for instance, digitisation of customer interactions is now linking reservations to customers’ own social media presence. The result? An intuitive and practical understanding of what delights customers and a dramatic lowering in the cost of customer acquisition through referral.
4. Recognising and rewarding customer delight disproportionately: Organisations have now become adept at the creation of reward and recognition programmes and this suitably recognises great performance across functional silos and for special projects. To ensure that this doesn’t become one of many awards, winning organisations are now devoting a significant amount of attention and pageantry to awards for Customer delight. In the insurance sector for instance, stories of frontline associates exceeding the call of duty have been celebrated and showcased at the board level by brands seeking to differentiate the recognition of customer delight. This significantly raises the bar and spurs employees to seek out customer insights, share it at a broader level and push for positive customer-centric change.
5. Designing lighthouse projects: With a focus on customer service having become a paramount priority in the effort to preserve a brand’s equity, much effort has gone into the resolution of complaints. Governed by KPIs and dashboards, this approach has now been changed by winning brands to influence growth. By conceiving of a systematic plan to capture referral, the service organisation is now completing the circle through a synergy with the sales organisation. For instance, housing and real estate companies seeking to get ahead of the curve are building customer dissatisfaction feedback from the service organisation into their design principles at a conceptualisation stage. By experimenting with this in small ways and building ‘lighthouse projects’ – examples that can shine a beacon on practices to be emulated, brands are adding greater momentum to their Return on Insights once the idea is scaled and replicated.
Equipped with this new mindset, smart organisations are looking to positively disrupt fondly held conventions in their category before someone else does. Building a data architecture enabled by a supporting digital platform is helping to weaponise the service department in a way few people would have imagined even a few years ago.
Clearly, reconfiguring your service organisation to perform as an engine of insights and innovation is a more powerful way of acing the insights game of the future.
