1. Concierge
Customer
Service:
How to Tilt the
Playing Field
in your Favor
Jeanne Hurlbert, PhD and Randy MacLean
HurlbertConcultingCover0216_Layout 1 2/22/16 12:28 PM Page 1
2. 1
Copyright 2016 WayPoint Analystics and Optinet Resources, LLC. First
Edition
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without the
permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions
contact Jeanne Hurlbert, PhD; www.ConciergeCustomerService.com.
3. Table of
Contents
Introduc)on……………………………………………………………………………………………………….2
Becoming
Customer-‐Centric:
The
Role
of
the
Chief
Customer
Officer……………..…4
What
Concierge
Customer
Service
Really
Means:
The
Key
Elements……………..…..6
How
Can
You
Afford
It?
The
Financial
Founda)on
of
Concierge
Customer
Service……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….9
Where
to
Start?
PuQng
Concierge
Customer
Service
in
Place……………..…………..12
Customizing
Concierge
Customer
Service
for
Your
Business—and
Your
Customers…..................................................................................................……..15
Moving
Forward………………………………………………………...……………………………………20
4. 2
Introduction
What’s the #1 concern of most wholesale distributors? Profit. But as you face such
challenges as disintermediation, the growth of nontraditional competitors, and technological
transformation, ensuring profitability has become increasingly challenging for many wholesale
distributors.
Despite these new challenges, things haven’t changed as much as it may seem. Your
keys to profitability lie exactly where they always have: with solid strategy. Three of the core
goals of that strategy should focus on CPR: conversion, penetration of your market, and
retention. Concierge Customer Service, or CCS as we’ll sometimes refer to it, helps you to
achieve those goals:
1. Retention—Because you offer Concierge Customer Service only to your most
profitable customers, as we explain in this book, it plays a key role in retaining
these valuable customers and protecting your profit. Concierge Customer Service
achieves that outcome in 2 ways.
• First, you provide your most profitable clients with a level of service that
your competitors can’t give them, making it impossible for those
competitors to wrest these customers away from you. And the retention
benefits actually extend beyond your top-tier customers: Because the
mindset of Concierge Customer Service will “trickle down” through your
organization to change its very culture, and because the system will
provide feedback from customers at all levels of profitability, you will see
retention benefits across the board. That means you can retain more of the
customers whom you want to keep.
• Second, because a true Concierge Customer Service system includes a
process to constantly garner customer feedback, you can ensure
exceptional levels of customer satisfaction and continuous process
improvement throughout your organization.
2. Penetration of Your Market--As the benefits of Concierge Customer
Service become apparent, other customers—such as your marginal accounts—
will want access to it. This gives you the opportunity to show them what
actions they need to take to gain access to the higher-level service. Those
actions, of course, are the actions that will make those accounts profitable for
you.
3. Conversion—Instituting Concierge Customer Service will allow you to
draw from your competitors the customers who resemble closely your most
profitable customers. Why can you do that? Because this exceptional level of
service—a level your competitors can’t afford to match—becomes a potent
sales tool for your team.
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In this book, we show you exactly how to gain these conversion, penetration, and
retention benefits, by building a Concierge Customer Service System that creates an exceptional
experience for your customers. Your CCS strategy embeds within your overall strategy to garner
profit gains and put your company ahead of others in the marketplace. Crafted correctly, your
overall strategy can tilt the playing field so that the best, most profitable customers in your
marketplace will gravitate to your company—away from your competitors--and the worst, most
unprofitable customers will defect to your competition, leaving you with profit gains. And as
long as you execute the strategy well, your competitors will remain unable to lure those best
customers away from you.
But, if you permit your competition to execute strategy more successfully than you do,
you’ll lose customers and you may never be able to draw them back. Whether your company’s
cash flow will be positive or negative, then, depends directly upon whether you, or your
competition, succeed in siphoning off the best part of your market. So let’s get started—let’s
learn how you can gain the benefits of Concierge Customer Service by becoming customer-
centric.
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Becoming Customer-Centric: The Role of the Chief Customer Officer
The importance of the Concierge Customer Service strategy becomes clear when we
recognize the extent to which top companies continue to become customer-centric: Whereas
fewer than twenty companies, worldwide, employed a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) in 2003,
more than 1 in 5 Fortune 100 companies and 1 in 10 Fortune 500 companies had instituted that
role by 2015. What does a Chief Customer Officer do? He or she:
• ensures that the company understands who their customers or clients are, at a deep
level;
• builds lasting relationships with those customers; and
• ensures that they serve those customers at the highest level.
To compete successfully in today’s environment, then, requires that you establish
formal systems for being customer-centric, so you increase customer retention. Designating a
CCO increases the probability that Concierge Customer Service will achieve the desired results.
Why? Because Concierge Customer Service has the highest probability of success when it’s led
by someone for whom customer is their chief priority, rather than just one of their priorities.
That’s why your company should seriously consider how you prioritize this key strategy. For
example, if you operate a relatively small business with limited personnel, you may not be able
to devote a full-time staff member serve as a CCO. In that case, consider putting a good manager
in place and make the responsibility for Concierge Customer Service half of his or her role.
Establishing a Chief Customer Officer dovetails beautifully with another critically-
important trend, the creation of the Chief Profit Officer (CPO). The CPO
• elevates the importance of profitability,
• evaluates the profitability of various actions,
• ensures the company pursues profitable strategies, and also
• ensures that customer service remains paramount in priorities and practices.
8. 5
Because establishing these two C-level roles ensures that the intertwined outcomes of
profitability and customer service receive the priority they deserve, establishing them formally
differentiates your company in the marketplace and does much to ensure your success.
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What Concierge Customer Service Really Means: The Key Elements
Your objective in establishing Concierge Customer Service should be to deliver a
differentiated, distinct, exceptional customer experience by giving customers MORE, an
acronym that encompasses mindset, ownership, referability, and experience. It means giving
your customers more than your competitors give and often more than your customers expect. To
maximize the conversion, penetration, and retention benefits of Concierge Customer Service, it
should be come more than just policy—it should become part of your culture, something
ingrained in your corporate DNA. Achieving that doesn’t require anything mystical or magical.
It’s primarily about executing the fundamentals, executing them well, and executing them
consistently.
Let’s look more closely at what this really means. Certainly most companies have a
customer service department. But in wholesale distribution, the term “customer service” has
become a codeword for “order entry.” Because customer service representatives receive the
orders, they’re also the people who talk to customers and are tasked with resolving customer
problems and complaints. You may call that customer service, but that’s not Concierge Customer
Service. Concierge Customer Service requires MORE—a reality in which customer service
means not just expedient ordering but also reliable problem resolution.
Concierge Customer Service is, by definition, EXTRAordinary, going “above and
beyond” what is typical. In a 5-star hotel, you might receive such amenities as having your bags
transported for you, being greeted throughout the hotel by your name at all times, and enjoying
complimentary limousine service. The level of service that your most profitable customers
receive should be similarly frictionless—and just as extraordinary.
Let’s look at the 4 key elements of Concierge Customer Service, the components of
giving your customers MORE:
Mindset means that the people who own customer service in your organization need to
• be patient,
• be good listeners,
• be oriented towards solving problems rather than providing excuses,
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• be lifelong learners, people who want to learn new things and learn how to put
them into action.
That also requires that you, as the business leader, support CCS representatives in that learning
process. The Concierge Customer Service mindset entails being able to “take the role of other”
easily and often, which means they know how to gather details on a problem and find out what
the customer wants. Their ability to understand well the customer’s point of view, taking notes to
ensure that they do so, proves critical to customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention—and when
you supplement it with a birds-eye view of customer preferences, through the Opportunity
Generator,™ you increase both retention of customers and conversion of prospects.
Ownership means that those charged with Concierge Customer Service take ownership
of customers’ problems, become an advocate for the customer, and provide solutions, ensuring
that they keep the customer apprised of each step through the process.
Referability should follow automatically if this process works well: When you provide
an extraordinary experience, people should be ready, willing, and able to go generate new clients
for you. This is true for two reasons. First, the “norm of reciprocity” a fundamental principle of
social life, demonstrates that when you give something to someone, they’re highly motivated to
give you something in return. Second, when we find something exemplary—whether it’s a
wonderful new restaurant or a business that provides extraordinary customer service—we’re
immediately motivated to tell others about it. And that’s why Concierge Customer Service makes
you so referable. Those referrals provide gold for your business because they let you reach deep
into your target market at exceedingly low cost, to virtually clone your best customers. The
fundamental question is: Will your customers refer you or will they send others to your
competitors? The answer to that question provides the ultimate measure of customer loyalty.
Experience. Providing an experience can be as simple as consistently executing the
fundamentals—something many of your competitors probably fail to do. The Four Seasons Hotel
seeks to “[s]ystematize the predictable so that [they] can humanize everything else.” When you
systematize predictable elements, you gain the ability to go above and beyond to provide that
extraordinary experience. Continuing to provide a wonderful customer experience proves key to
12. 8
distinguishing your business in the marketplace; the key to referability; and the key to
satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.
When you select, train, and motivate your Concierge Customer Service representatives so
that they embody these 4 elements, you differentiate your business immediately. Just think of the
number of times you’ve experienced some kind of problem and had a customer service agent
shuffle the problem off to another agent—or worse, try to foist the problem back on you. When
your Concierge Customer Service representatives respond to any problem by saying, “I can’t
believe that happened to you. I’m on it. Go back to your job, I’m going to take care of all of it,
and I’m going to call you in a couple of hours and tell you how to solve your problem or I’ll tell
you what’s going on,” you change the game in your business. The key to your success, then, lies
in finding people who will make that happen because they have the right mindset, they take
ownership consistently, they provide an exceptional experience, and make you imminently
referable.
13. CHAPTER THREE
How Can You Afford
It? The Financial
Foundation of
Concierge Customer
Service
3
14. 9
How Can You Afford It? The Financial Foundation of Concierge Customer Service
Because this level of service is so extensive, it is also expensive. Funding this service
requires that you offer it only to the customers who generate the most profit for your business. At
WayPoint Analytics, for example, 40 of our 1,000 accounts produce 80% of our profit; some of
our clients have 10,000 accounts, with less than 100 of them accounting for 75% of the profit.
For that reason, Concierge Customer Service will likely extend only to the top 5% of your
customers. How do you know to whom to extend Concierge Customer Service? Your
profitability ranking of your clients will show you which clients are sufficiently profitable to
fund Concierge Customer Service. When you examine the Net Before Compensation (NBC)
ranking report or any profitability rankings in WayPoint Analytics, you will see something your
competitors can’t: You will see that the accounts with the highest volume are not necessarily the
most profitable. Why? Because their cost-to-serve stands higher than that of many lower-volume
accounts. Once WayPoint reveals those high-profit accounts, you can retain them—and the
profit they generate--by providing them with service that far exceeds that of your competitors.
The first thing to analyze, to achieve those benefits, is the balance between gross profit
dollars and cost-to-serve dollars on every invoice, on every account, in every territory. The math
proves simple: The profitability of your business depends upon whether the gross profit dollars
that you generate exceed the cost-to-serve dollars consumed by your logistics. When you apply
this principle to customer service, you recognize quickly the importance of watching this element
carefully—otherwise, you risk generating significant account attrition as you start to develop
new priorities, processes, and systems. You must retain the gross profit generation from you
most profitable accounts—the core—and Concierge Customer Service provides the
mechanism for doing so. This is the first benefit of CCS.
Once you’ve assessed carefully the balance between gross profit dollars and cost-to-serve
dollars, the second element is to prepare for the eventual loss of gross profit dollars from
accounts that are actually losing money—that is, accounts in which the cost-to-serve dollars
exceed the gross-profit dollars they create. The answer isn’t to just “fire” these accounts
immediately. Doing so would prove imprudent because you would have to either rationalize your
infrastructure and personnel to compensate for the loss in gross profit, or garner additional gross
15. 10
profit dollars to replace the gross profit dollars lost from the “drain” accounts. That’s why your
second step is to make the necessary preparations to lose those accounts without hurting your
bottom line.
And you can do so in a way that will add conversion and market penetration benefits to
the retention benefits that CCS brings: The best way to garner the additional gross profit
dollars you will need is to convert to customers companies who resemble closely your top
accounts. You do that in two ways. First, you target the accounts of companies that compete
directly with your best accounts by offering them a service advantage—Concierge Customer
Service. You can afford to do so because, as long as your logistics costs remain far below the
gross profit dollars you generate, you can afford to earn lower profit margins to woo those
accounts away from your competitors. Concierge Customer Service, then, quickly becomes a
wonderful conversion tool for attracting new high-end customers. And the more visible your
Concierge Customer Service engine becomes, the more powerfully it draws those highly-
profitable customers away from your competitors.
As you can see, the second element that allows you to achieve these conversion benefits
is mastering and managing cost-to-serve and pricing. Here’s a secret that many of your
competitors don’t know: Our research shows that most companies can offer 8-10% price (or
margin) reduction to your best accounts without losing money—in other words, your most
profitable accounts will likely remain profitable if you reduce the margin by 8-10 points.
Although we aren’t suggesting that you immediately approach your best customers and reduce
prices, you can find customers that resemble closely your most profitable accounts, or companies
that generate 10-15% bottom line net on what they’re bringing to you. If you reduce your margin
by 1-2 points to bring in accounts that are very similar to these highly-profitable companies, you
can have them give you 10%, rather than 15%, NBC (Net Before Compensation). In this way,
you use the superior customer service strategies and pricing to go after the best accounts at your
competition without affecting your bottom line—thus, you increase the conversion of
companies who resemble closely your most profitable accounts.
But don’t stop there. Concierge Customer Service can serve a market penetration
function by transforming money-losing accounts into money-making accounts. The accounts
16. 11
that sit mired at the bottom of your profitability ranking report cost you money because their
high volume comes with a correspondingly high cost to serve. That high cost to serve
overwhelms the gross profit that the accounts produce. “Reforming” those accounts can be as
simple as having your salespeople invite them to become platinum accounts, so they receive the
Concierge Customer Service that will make their lives easier. Your salespeople might explain to
them that “The problem that we have right now is that your account is out of balance because
you’re buying too much stuff too often, in too-small quantities, and that’s destroying your ability
to be profitable and our ability to provide the service that we provide to other companies.”
As Concierge Customer Service embeds in your company, it will transform your culture
so that the benefits “trickle down” from the most profitable to the less profitable customers—and
so will your retention gains, enabling you to retain the customers whom you want to keep. As
you change your orientation to customer service and put in place systems to monitor customer
satisfaction and expectations across the board, you will find retention increases across profitable
accounts (beyond the most profitable accounts who receive Concierge Customer Service).
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Where to Start? Putting Concierge Customer Service in Place
Although all of this may sound complicated, the reality is that simple steps can achieve
these gains. The first thing we recommend is to select and train at least two people whose role
will be solely to provide Concierge Customer Service to your top accounts. From the point of
view of those customers, then, they will gain exclusive access to these dedicated “problem
solvers.” You will then establish a dedicated phone number and email address that leads directly
to these two dedicated representatives—and customers should know that when they call that
number, one of those representatives will answer the phone, with no automated menus.
Once those representatives answer the phone, they will follow a clear process to
• Identify the problem that the customer needs to solve,
• Ask questions to ensure that the representative understands the problem fully,
• Take notes on the nature of the problem and the desired resolution,
• Summarize the problem to the customer (to ensure the representative understands
it completely),
• Outline for the customer the steps the representative will take to resolve the
problem,
• Give the customer a time interval within which the representative will update the
customer on the progress, and—most important of all
• Assure the customer that he or she will personally solve the problem, and then do
so.
Remember, the key is that these representatives give customers MORE, bringing the right
mindset, taking ownership of the problem to ensure resolution, making your company referable
through their actions and the satisfaction they create, and providing an exceptional experience
for your high-level customers.
Remember also that your representatives can only accomplish these goals if they are
empowered—if they have sufficient knowledge, training, and especially authority to solve the
customers’ problems. High-level hotels often authorize their front-line personnel to spend up to
$2,000 or $3,000 to make customers happy, if a problem arises. Amazon provides another
example of the kind of service we’re describing. Why choose Amazon? In part because, if
something goes wrong, you will not have to disrupt your day and divert your energy from your
business to solve the problem. Instead, you can simply push a button beside your order on the
Amazon website to request help. Your phone will ring within five seconds and you will speak
19. 13
with someone who is completely empowered to be not only empathetic but also effective in
solving your problem—even if that means sending a new product to you before the problem
product has been returned. They will even give you a $25 credit for your trouble. In short,
customers buy from Amazon because they know that they’re just a phone call away from a
complete solution. So you’ve got to make sure that you’re actually making a financial, personnel,
and logistics commitment to ensuring that these things are in place. You have to ensure that your
representatives can go outside the norm to solve problems, whether that means going to the
warehouse themselves, holding a truck back, or putting a replacement item on the next truck.
Once you have the program in place, you need to introduce it carefully and systematically
to your eligible customers. This means that you absolutely must have the buy-in of your sales
team—and you must secure that buy-in before the inception of the program. In fact, when we
work with clients to design and implement Concierge Customer Service, we often survey not
only the customers but also the sales team, so that we gain “intelligence” on customers from both
perspectives and so we can also uncover objections the sales team might harbor. Once you
uncover any potential objections, you can overcome them in the introduction and training.
The goal is for sales team members to be eager to deliver this delicious new perk to their
top clients. To achieve that goal, you must provide both the training and the tools they need.
First, they must be fully conversant on the nature of the new system and receive hands-on
exposure to its operation. Particularly important will be ensuring that they understand fully the
benefits of CCS and its exclusive nature, so that they can and will communicate those benefits to
their top customers. Then you need to provide tools that will allow them to introduce the
program in a way that elevates it appropriately. For example, you might purchase a gift item for
the customer’s desk (such as an iPhone holder, iPad case, letter holder, magnet, or picture frame)
imprinted with the Concierge Customer Service phone number. Salespeople should deliver the
news of the new Concierge Customer Service program as if they were gingerly and excitedly
bringing a gift that will change the customer’s business--because that’s exactly what they’re
doing.
Once the program is in place, each participating company should receive reports at least
quarterly on the benefits they’ve received from the program. You should give each customer a
20. 14
“scorecard” that underscores what you accomplished for them. This, too, will become a key tool
for increased customer retention and for market penetration. Emphasize to the customer the
extent to which you’ve gone beyond the norm to provide extraordinary service, highlight any
problems you solved for them and the resources you saved for the company. Creating that
report, then, requires that each CCS representative track every customer interaction,
documenting clearly the nature of the problem, the resolution of the problem, the customer’s
reaction, and an estimate of the time, money, or other resources saved by solving the problem
for them. Redacted versions of these data can be used to encourage less-profitable customers to
reform and join the ranks of the most profitable customers.
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Customizing Concierge Customer Service for Your Business—and Your Customers
At its core, the goal of Concierge Customer Service is to ensure you’re serving your
customers, especially your best customers, well. To accomplish that, you must be able to answer
2 key questions:
1. What do your customers want?
2. How satisfied are they with the extent to which you’re giving them what they
want?
You can’t serve your customers well if you don’t know them well. That means you must
understand, from their point of view, what kind of service they want. Your CCS system should
be tailored to those specific wants—so although every CCS system contains a set of core
elements, company-specific elements also exist. Once you design and implement the system with
your custom elements, you must constantly gather feedback from your customers to ensure
you’re giving them what they want. That doesn’t mean just putting together a few questions and
sending them out; your feedback system needs to be carefully crafted so that it enhances the
critically-important bond you’ve built with your customers, rather than undermining it. In other
words, if you’re treating your customers with velvet gloves, you don’t want to send out a survey
that feels to them like a slap in the face.
You accomplish these goals by implanting Concierge Customer Service in three phases.
Phase I— The Opportunity Generator™ and the Feedback Generator™ allow you to
answer the two fundamental questions of what your customers want and how satisfied they are
with the extent to which you’re giving them what they want. By using these tools to answer those
two questions, you not only place your Concierge Customer Service system on a firm foundation
but also gather information that most of your competitors won’t have.
The Opportunity Generator™ shows you what the top priorities of your customers are or
what problems they want to solve most urgently; in many cases, you’re focusing on “what keeps
them up at night.” Once you understand that, you not only know where to focus your customer
service efforts but you also know how to orient your content, products or services, and marketing
so that they align directly with your customers’ core concerns. That means you not only gain
23. 16
invaluable information for your Concierge Customer Service system, you also gain added value
for your content creation and marketing.
Of course, one of the key issues you should measure with the Opportunity Generator™ is
the customer service touch points that are most important to your customers. For example, how
do they want you to communicate with them? How quickly do they expect answers to their
questions? What do they want in a customer service system? When we’ve measured these kinds
of customer preferences, the data have proved invaluable.
The Feedback Generator™ in Phase I proves critically important for two reasons. First, it
illuminates areas in which you need to improve and in which customer service problems are
likely to arise—if you can improve in those areas, you can reduce customer problems and
complaints. Second, these data provide a baseline measure of satisfaction and loyalty against
which to measure the results of your customer service and Concierge Customer Service efforts.
Most importantly, you’ll leverage this investment in Phase III, because this survey will become
the core of your ongoing feedback mechanism. And here, too, you gain added value because you
can leverage this same information in your marketing, to skyrocket conversions externally; and
to ensure continuous process improvement and ensure you retain your best customers,
internally.
Your ability to achieve these outcomes comes from the five core forms of social proof
that your Feedback Generator™ provides:
1. Testimonials provide the “stories that stick” with prospective customers.
These stories persuade best when they describe: 1) what the problem,
issue, or challenge was, before using your product or service; 2) the
experience of purchasing from you, working with you, or using your
product or service; and 3) the results the customer obtained. The Customer
Feedback Generator™ employs a proprietary Testimonial Generator™
that automatically invites a customer to leave a testimonial when he or she
has provided positive feedback. If the customer isn’t happy, the system
asks why AND automatically sends an email alert to your customer
service team, so you can contact the customer quickly and correct the
problem immediately. Thus, you’re not only generating powerful
testimonials that increase conversion but also increasing retention by
ensuring that you spot problems quickly and respond immediately. This
24. 17
is key to providing Concierge Customer Service. But no matter how
glowing your testimonials are, they may not be enough to convince your
prospective customers, who may worry that the testimonials were hand
picked or don’t represent typical results. The stark reality is that many of
your competitors won’t have the information to answer those questions or
overcome those objections. Statistical satisfaction data provide the most
powerful form of social proof to overcome that hurdle.
2. General satisfaction data come from measures in the Customer Feedback
Generator™ that tap the global, or overall satisfaction with your product, service,
or business. These measures typically provide useful information for your
marketing, because they’re easily interpreted and offer a summary indicator. To
really ensure that you serve your customers at the highest level, and to ensure
continuous process improvement for your business, we recommend that you
combine these measures with specific satisfaction data.
3. Specific satisfaction data augment the general or overall data in 2 ways:
• If overall satisfaction is high, they can illuminate areas that can still be enhanced.
This proves key to continuous process improvement.
• If overall satisfaction proves to be low, these measures provide vital information
to identify critical areas of improvement—including customer service—on which
you can take action to increase overall satisfaction before it affects your bottom
line. This proves key to customer retention and offers the secret to true concierge
customer service.
These general and specific satisfaction measures aren’t just useful internally;
they can also fuel your marketing by providing even more ammunition to
increase conversions, sales, and revenue. And here’s a tip to make them even
more powerful: If you target your specific satisfaction questions in your
Satisfaction Data Generator™ at areas in which customers’ objections
typically arise, you’ll gain a powerful weapon for overcoming those
objections.
4. Referrals come most easily when you invite satisfied customers to refer
their connections to you. Because your customers’ connections are highly
likely to be similar to your current customers—your ideal target market—
and because your customers’ connections are much more likely to trust
you if they receive a referral directly from someone they know and trust,
conversions on referrals prove to be extraordinarily high. The Referral
Generator,™ then, is the tool that lets you glean easily the referrals that
concierge customer service creates—and it also provides an indicator of
how well your Concierge Customer Service system is making you
referable.
5. Online reviews often lie “off the radar” for wholesale distributors. But these
reviews have become a key driver in consumer decision-making: A recent study
by Deloitte reveals that 1 in 4 (25%) of all Americans do “comparison shopping”
on the web and fully 75%--3 in 4--of surveyed respondents indicated that the
25. 18
information presented on online rating sites is “generally fair.” This means that
the decision-makers in the companies you serve will increasingly turn to these
reviews. In fact, we’ve found online reviews that some wholesale distributors’
customers have placed online—and the distributors didn’t even know they were
there. Because so many distributors underestimate the importance of these
reviews, those who do implement a system--like the Online Review Generator™--
to ethically encourage positive reviews can quickly move ahead of competitors
who don’t take action. If you’re providing concierge customer service to your
customers, satisfied customers can automatically be invited to leave online
reviews with the Online Review Generator.™
Phase II—In Phase II, you use the information gleaned in Phase I to customize your
Concierge Customer Service system.
Among the key elements of this phase are:
1. Identifying potential CCS representatives--individuals (either inside or outside
your organization) who embody the necessary characteristics to give customers
MORE. Useful tools for this phase can include such assessments as Kolbe™ or
the DISC® profile. In some cases, you may be able to promote individuals in your
company to the dedicated CCS positions; in other cases, you will need to recruit
individuals from outside your company.
2. Whether you promote individuals from your ranks or hire individuals from
outside, you will need to train them thoroughly in your CCS system. The
customer interactions and problem-solving that we described above are “front
stage” interactions. Those interactions only go smoothly if you have created and
instilled a solid system of “back stage” job descriptions and procedures.
Remember, though, that no matter how good your job descriptions and procedures
become, these representatives must be sufficiently knowledgeable and
autonomous to be able to make good decisions on a case-by-case basis.
3. As your new CCS representatives move through their training process, let them
know that no matter how busy they are, they must drop everything and respond to
the customer when the phone rings. The immediate, genuinely enthusiastic
response to the customer must be, “I’m on it, and I’m going to get back to you
after a few hours when I have the solution.” That customer must feel as if he or
she is the only customer you serve.
4. Your sales team, too, must be trained in the new system and aligned with its
goals.
5. Systems should be created that allow the CCS representatives to track all
customer interactions, identifying clearly what problems the customer presented,
who presented them (company, position, and name/contact information), the
actions taken, and the outcome.
6. Reporting mechanisms need to be put in place so that customers can see the
benefits of their participation in this system.
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7. Once the CCS system is in place, use data from Phase I to identify problems in
general customer service (the service given to non-CCS customers) so that you
can improve that system, as well.
And as you begin to introduce that system to your customers, the data you collected in
Phase I will prove invaluable. Reporting back to your customers on survey results always
cements your bond with them by showing that you’re listening to them, but that process can be
particularly advantageous as you introduce Concierge Customer Service. Here’s what we suggest
you include in your report:
1. Report on positive results—for example, “we are so gratified to find that 98% of
you are satisfied with our company and 95% would recommend us.”
2. Identify at least 2 aspects of customer service that showed an opportunity for
improvement.
3. Identify the customer service preferences revealed in the survey.
4. Use #2 and #3 as a rationale for your new customer service program. In this way,
you tie the program directly to your customers’ sentiments, preferences, and
feedback.
Phase III—In Phase III, you capitalize upon the investment you made in the Opportunity
Generator™ and Feedback Generator™ in Phase I. Here, you use the survey that provided your
roadmap to customizing Concierge Customer Service to collect feedback on an ongoing basis.
This can be done at low cost by setting up autoresponders that invite customers to provide
feedback at designated intervals. For example, you might decide to re-survey all customers who
were invited to provide Phase I feedback every 9 months, then to survey all new customers 3
months after on-boarding and every 9 months thereafter. This provides a cost-effective way to
keep your finger on the pulse of customer sentiment, to ensure that your Concierge Customer
Service—and your customer service, more generally—produces satisfied, loyal customers.
Remember that your feedback system pays for itself, because the added benefit will be
testimonials and statistical data that can transform your marketing and content creation to
skyrocket conversions.
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Moving Forward
More and more companies are crafting and implementing strategy to steal the best
customers from their competitors and foist the worst customers on those competitors. As these
strategies permeate the market and adoption of WayPoint Analytics proceeds, you must choose
either to implement and profit from these strategies or to fall victim to them when your
competitors adopt them. Making the commitment to Concierge Customer Services constitutes an
investment in your future that yields dividends in customer retention, market penetration, and
conversion. The retention benefits mean that you not only tie your most profitable customers to
you tightly (by providing service that your competitors can’t match) but also increase retention
of all profitable accounts, by constantly monitoring satisfaction and loyalty. Conversion benefits
derive from your ability to “clone” your top accounts by drawing similar companies from your
competitors and market penetration comes from converting unprofitable to profitable accounts. If
you execute this strategy well, then, you render your competition irrelevant.
To help you move forward right away, we’ve provided for you the opportunity to
schedule a complimentary, one-hour strategy session with Dr. Jeanne Hurlbert. To schedule your
session, just go to www.ConciergeCustomerService.com.
29. SCHEDULE A
To help you move forward right away, we’ve
provided for you the opportunity to schedule a
complimentary, one-hour strategy session with Dr.
Jeanne Hurlbert.
LEARN MORE
Strategy Session
