The ultimate guide to customer service excellence

An eBook from Loyalty Bay on how to bring a Growth Mindset into Customer Service
THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO
CUSTOMER SERVICE EXCELLENCE
Think like Amazon, communicate like CDBaby, and execute like Zappos

INTRODUCTION
A lumberjack strained to saw down a tree. An old
man walked past and stopped to watch.
After a while, the lumberjack snapped: “What are
you looking at?”
The visitor said: “You look exhausted! Why don’t you
take a break?”
The lumberjack explained to the old man that he had
too much to do and had no time to take a break.
The old man said: “At least sharpen the saw, no? It
looks really dull. You haven’t made much progress
since I came.”
The lumberjack said: “You don’t get it! I don’t have
TIME to sharpen the saw. I have three more trees
to cut down today. I’m just too busy!”
Customer service teams who don’t sharpen
their saw risk their company’s future.
They are the company’s face to the world in
which customer expectations keep rising.
One of the most important elements of
sharpening the customer service saw is to
• Inject a marketing mindset—measure
and understand your customer.
• Have a butler mindset—empathise and
anticipate what your customers need.
• Start seeing customer service as a profit
centre—not a cost centre.
In this book, we will explore
these three ideas in detail.
The Ultimate Guide To Customer Service Excellence | 2

CONTENTS
Part 1:......Customer Service Matters
....................But the basics aren’t enough ...................................................................................4
Part 2:......The Marketing Mindset
....................Measuring Customer Service quality...................................................................9
Part 3: .....The Butler’s Mindset
....................Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes ........................................................ 18
Part 4: .....The Profit Centre Mindset
....................Systematically boosting the quality of your Customer Service ............. 22
Part 5: .....Getting Managers on Board ............................................................................... 30
Part 6:......Tools............................................................................................................................... 36

PART 1
Customer Service Matters
But the basics aren’t enough

For most people, customer
service matters more than price
Across five sectors (Banking,
Mobile Phones, Retail, Travel,
Gaming), Customer Service
was the most important
decision-making factor when
choosing between options, even
surpassing price.1
“Sensitivity to price is strongly
correlated with problem
encounters. If the customer has
had a smooth experience with no
problems, only 10% express any
concern about price. As soon
as they experience a problem,
sensitivity to price doubles.
A second problem doubles this
price sensitivity once again.”2
“66% of US consumers
are willing to spend more
money with a company that
provides them with excellent
customer service.”3
(1) Summary here https://econsultancy.com/reports/multichannel-customer-experience-report, original reseach (paid) here https://econsultancy.com/reports/multichannel-customer-experience-report
(2) https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2013/04/myth-great-customer-service-enhances-margins.html
(3) http://uk.businessinsider.com/customer-service-experiences-are-more-important-than-ever-in-the-age-of-e-commerce-2016-3

Good Customer Service leads to revenue growth
...purchased more
after a good customer
service experience.
B2B
62%
B2C
42%
...stopped buying
after a bad customer
service interaction.
B2B
66%
B2C
52%
...have been influenced by an
online customer service review
when making a buying decision.
B2B/C
88%
Source: Dimensional Research & Zendesk: Customer Service and Business Results - A survey of Customer Service from Mid-Size Companies, available here: https://d16cvnquvjw7pr.cloudfront.net/resources/
whitepapers/Zendesk_WP_Customer_Service_and_Business_Results.pdf
“Customer Service directly
impacts revenue: 62% of
B2B customers purchased
more after a good customer
service experience.”
Click-to-tweet

But expectations for Customer Service are rising
(1) The State of Global Customer Service Report 2017: http://info.microsoft.com/rs/157-GQE-382/images/EN-CNTNT-Report-DynService-2017-global-state-customer-service.pdf
(2) The State of Digital Care in 2018: https://www.conversocial.com/hubfs/2018-State-of-Digital-Customer-Service.pdf
In a recent Microsoft survey1
,
• 96% of respondents say customer service is important in their
choice of and loyalty to a brand.
• 72% expect agents to already know who they are and what their
history with the company is.
• 56% have stopped doing business with a brand due to a poor
customer service experience.
Especially the last figure is striking. Imagine how much business would
have been retained if these poor customer service experiences had not
occurred?
At the same time, standards keep rising. 67% of respondents believe
that customer service is getting better. Similarly, 81% of respondents
to a large 2018 Conversocial survey2
said that their expectations for
digital customer service are higher today than they were a year ago.
Only 7% see their expectations for customer service exceeded, which is
an opportunity to stand out.
Our own anecdotal evidence confirms this. Almost no company can
afford to provide really poor customer service—times on hold are
getting shorter and agents are more competent than ever.
—> Being good at the basics does not
differentiate you enough any more.
An arms race is underway among
companies who have understood that
customer service is a crucial investment to
grow their business and retain customers.
Companies who want to be known for
their customer service need to become
more creative.
“Being good at the basics does not
differentiate you enough. Companies
who want to be known for their
customer service need to become
more creative.”
Click-to-tweet

What needs to change in the
Customer Service mindset
Customer Service teams are at the front line of customer interactions.
Their work has a big impact on how the company is perceived.
CUSTOMER SERVICE TEAMS NEED...
A MARKETING MINDSET
MEASURE & UNDERSTAND
A PROFIT CENTRE MINDSET
INVEST & GROW
A BUTLER’S MINDSET
EMPATHISE & ANTICIPATE

PART 2
The Marketing Mindset
Measuring Customer Service Quality

Since Customer Service
impacts revenue, it’s
worth doing it well
Let’s recap—We showed how customer service
contributes to revenue: By delighting customers and
making them more likely to stay and spend more.
So obviously, it’s important to know how you’re doing in
your customer support.
By measuring Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net
Promoter Score (NPS) via Satisfaction Surveys.
Let’s look at each of these in turn.
“Customer Service impacts revenue, so it’s
worth doing well: By systematically measuring
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter
Score (NPS) via Satisfaction Surveys.”
Click-to-tweet

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)—Pros and Cons
CSAT comprises a variety of survey
types that measure a customer’s
satisfaction—with the product in
general, the most recent customer
service interaction, or another
aspect of the company’s offering.
But most often, you’ll want to
know if the customer was happy
with a recent customer service
interaction.
CSAT surveys are immediate and
capture the customer’s sentiment
immediately after an interaction,
which is a great excuse to keep
the flow of communication going.
Also, you get a good idea if you
are improving over time, and you
can measure the performance of
individual agents.
If executed well, CSAT score
improvements predict better
business performance (see page 6).
But CSAT also has a serious
drawback: By prioritising the most
recent interaction, it can distort
the image you have of your
customers’ sentiments.
Put differently: I, a customer, might
be sympathetic to the agent who
just did her very best to help me.
But on the inside, I’m unhappy
about the company and their lack
of flexibility. I’m certain I will never
use them again. But since I know
that my satisfaction score will get
back to the agent (who was very
kind), I may be tempted to be nice
and give a friendly CSAT score.
If the company accepts that CSAT
score as representative, they are
fooling themselves with much too
rosy a picture.
So we have to balance CSAT with a
more high-level metric that takes
into account not only the recent
interaction, but the customer’s
more general sentiment towards
the company.
Thankfully, we have a great
metric for that purpose—the Net
Promoter Score (NPS).
But first, let’s look at some CSAT
best practices.

Best practices for CSAT measurement
In earlier times, companies asked you to fill out
surveys like these.
There are 10 little boxes in the 0% progress bar — this means
you’ll be with this survey for 10-15 minutes.
What fun.
The days of multi-page customer satisfaction
surveys are long gone.
In 2018,
Keep it short. The fewer questions the better.
Make sure that you cover two key elements:
• Measure — collect a metric that measures
the same thing over time
• Understand — get an idea about what
triggered poor (but also good!) feedback
Timing is key. Send the survey close to the
trigger event, ideally within 24 hours.
Be specific in your wording. You may be
sending the CSAT survey right away, but some
customers might open it a few days later. If
possible, remind them about the issue they
faced, or mention the agent’s name—anything
that will help them remember.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a concept devised by Fred
Reichheld, Bain & Company and Satmetrix Systems. The
question being asked is:
“How likely is it that you would recommend our company/
product/service to a friend or colleague?”
The answers are captured on a scale from 0 to 10, with
10 being the most enthusiastic endorsement.
The way to collect NPS data is through ongoing
customer satisfaction surveys.
MEASUREMENT
The secret sauce with NPS is how it’s
calculated.
It’s not that you just take the average of the
scores you collect.
Instead, anyone who gives a score of 6 or
below is considered a detractor. If you score
a service at this level, you are likely to speak
negatively about it to your friends and family.
Similarly, if you give something a score of 9 or
10, you are a promoter, because you will likely
speak positively about it in your social circle.
7s and 8s are considered passives whose
comments to their friends will be neither good
nor bad.
The formula then is
(% Promoters) - (% Detractors) * 100
You can find a more detailed explanation incl examples in the appendix.
“Net Promoter Score (NPS) is as important for
Customer Service teams as it is for Marketing and the
C-Suite. It crucially complements your CSAT surveys.”
Click-to-tweet

Why is NPS so effective —
and what makes it different from CSAT?
NPS better reflects the customer’s overall sentiment
towards you and their propensity to stay with you.
There is something special about asking someone
whether they would recommend you to others.
If you just asked them “How much do you like us on a
scale of 0-10?”, there wouldn’t be much at stake if they
chose to be… let’s say less than truthful.
But when being asked—even hypothetically—to put
their reputation on the line, most people ponder the
question more seriously. It’s as if they believed that if
they say 10, they will really have to go out there and
enthusiastically recommend you to their friends.
Internally, NPS is a great source of focus…
NPS is the lens that bundles the rays of the customer
sentiment sun. Everyone in your team can rally around
one metric that matters most, instead of scattering their
efforts to improve five metrics at once.
… and accountability
NPS makes your life hard because it doesn’t just
calculate an average of all the scores you collected. That
would be easy. No, it rewards you for good word of
mouth, because 9s and 10s will actively promote you
to their friends. And it punishes you for bad service,
because 6s and below are assumed to actively badmouth
you. That is scary. Every customer service agent can
imagine the negative impact.
A customer liking you 6 out of 10—that’s a shoulder
shrug.
A customer dissing you to their friends is a real problem.
“High Net Promoter Scores correlate with high
success. (...) It’s the highest NPS startups I work with
that continue to grow and even accelerate.”
Jason Lemkin,
Co-Founder of Echosign and SaaS Venture Capitalist

Ways to collect NPS data from your customers
Use MixMax or similar tools
to allow questions to be
answered inside the email
message.
Via Email
The beauty with this method is that all the
customer has to do is to respond with one
score number—and be done.
Ensure you have the customers’ permission
to message them (i.e. be GDPR compliant).
Via SMS / Whatsapp
We at Loyalty Bay are big fans of Intercom (and we’re
not being paid for this)—their features and usability are
just spectacular.
Intercom allows you to ask your customers questions
while they are on your page (both logged in and out).
Via Intercom
(and similar tools)
If you have been
communicating with a
customer via a Facebook
Messenger bot before,
you can ask them there.
ViaChatbot
Ask for NPS right after a customer
service call, but the agent shouldn’t ask
directly. Instead, they should ask the
customer to “answer a 1-question survey
to a phone bot right after I hang up.” That
way, the response will be more honest.
On the phone
Ensure you have one single view of the customer —
All the channels need to converge for you to have a full
view of the respondent. This is best done under the
responsibility of the Account Owner1
.
Don’t overdo it with the asking —
No customer should see the NPS question more than
once per quarter (unless they have more frequent 1-1
touchpoints with your customer support team).
(1) We expand on the concept of one single point of contact for customers (we call them the Account Owner) in our eBook “The Ultimate Guide to Loyalty and Retention”, available here.
TWO TIPS

Example of a feedback collection cadence
Test the optimal
frequency and
follow-up intensity.
In this scenario, we’re
implying frequent
surveying, which may
be a bit tedious for the
customer. In that case,
you may want to reduce
the intensity (e.g. only do
email or only SMS, and
not do any follow up in
case they don’t respond).
NPS measurement – 1x quarter
Customer has a 1-1 interaction with a customer service agent
Customer logs in into their online account and changes something
Customer participates in a loyalty campaign led by the customer
success department
Events that
trigger CSAT
surveys
TIME
3
6
7
9
4
4
5 5
RecurringNPS
scoring (0-10)
CSAT Surveys (1-5)

What if they don’t answer?
There are two types of problems associated with filling out surveys, no matter if CSAT or NPS:
Low response rate and self-selection bias. Here’s how to tackle them.
Low Response Rate Self-Selection Bias
Companies have survey response rates anywhere from 2%
to 50%, so it depends on your sector and how engaged your
audience is with you in general.
But here’s a few tips for increasing response rates:
• The fewer questions the better. Think like when packing
for an Everest climb: Will I REALLY need this extra item?
• Maximise your channels (see previous chapter): ask
customers the same question through two or more
avenues (but don’t overdo it)
• Share how previous customer feedback has resulted in
changes. People want to know if and how their input will
lead to action on your end.
• Bundle it with other communication (“your reservation
number & a question about your satisfaction”)
• Make the survey really mobile friendly, and answerable
in just one or two taps.
People tend to respond to surveys more when they are
either ecstatic or boiling with rage1
. This means that the top
and bottom ends of the bell curve are overrepresented.
Here’s how you can tackle this:
• Look into Propensity Scorie Matching, a nerdy way of
adjusting for this overrepresentation.
• Do a one-off phone campaign where you survey a
random sample of customers (i.e. not just those who
choose to respond to a written survey). Contrast these
results with those you collected via surveys. That way,
you can quantify your customers’ self-selection bias.
• If none of this is possible, at least be consistent in how
you measure it, so that you get a realistic impression
of change (i.e. relative performance) over time, even if
absolute performance is not truly reliable.
(1) Further reading on this: https://select-statistics.co.uk/case-studies/accounting-for-self-selection-biases-in-customer-satisfaction-surveys/

PART 3
The Butler’s Mindset
Putting yourself in the Customer’s shoes

The Butler Mindset is a good frame
of mind for Customer Service
We at Loyalty Bay love butlers.
Not that we can afford any (yet!), but we love the idea of
someone discreetly removing undue friction from our lives.
“A Butler quietly, discreetly thinks
ahead; Is friendly, not familiar;
invisible, yet available. That kind
of mindset should permeate
Customer Service teams as well.”
Click-to-tweet
A BUTLER...
… is friendly, not familiar
… is invisible yet available
… quietly, discreetly thinks ahead
… has a “no job is too small” mentality
… anticipates problems before they happen
… always carries pen and paper to take notes
… brings a sense of security in an unnoticeable way
… knows that their appearance reflects on their employer
… learns what their employer and their guests like and dislike
We believe that the Butler Mindset is optimal for outstanding Customer Service.

How does the Butler Mindset translate into
the Customer Service department?
Nurture the Butler mindset in your team agent training and support it with reliable processes.
Agent Training Process Setup
You will have to train your agents
and continuously reinforce the
mindset
• Give them reading material
about butlers—e.g. Up and
Down Stairs by Jeremy Musson
or The Butler’s Guide by
Stanley Ager.
• Give awards to those who
embody this mindset the most.
• Share case studies of desirable
behaviour.
You’ll need to support your agents to activate the Butler mindset.
• Give them power to decide on small tokens of gratitude and apology—
they should not need their manager’s approval for a small gift.
• Highlight points of customer friction to the agent so that they can take
action proactively.
- For example, a customer tried to set up an appointment online
but stopped before the final step. The agent needs to have this
information at their fingertips as soon as it happens.
• Ease the pressure of requiring agents to resolve a certain number of
inbound tickets per day—an always rushed butler is not a good butler.
• Provide a place (e.g. an internal discussion board) where they can ask
colleagues for advice when faced with tricky issues.

Examples of a Butler Mindset
These companies really got it right
A customer had a family tragedy
and bought a last-minute ticket
with Southwest over the phone.
But the airport was very busy that
day, and he arrived at the gate a few
minutes too late.
Somehow, though, the story about
the family tragedy had made it to
the pilot. He refused to take off
without the passenger and told him:
“They can’t go anywhere without
me and I wasn’t going anywhere
without you. Now relax. We’ll get
you there. And again, I’m so sorry.”
A blizzard made it impossible for
people to leave a John Lewis store
at the end of a busy shopping day
before Christmas.
The store manager Deborah
Strazza decided to allow the 100
or so stranded customers and
employees to sleep over in the
shop. (There’s enough soft stuff to
lie on at John Lewis, after all.) As
Deborah said: “This is the culture
at John Lewis. When a customer
has a problem, you deal with the
uniqueness of that problem. No one
is constrained by the systems and
processes around them.”
A little girl wrote to Sainsburys
asking why their Tiger Bread wasn’t
called Giraffe Bread as it looked
more like a giraffe.
She received a friendly letter back
(find it in the Appendix), together
with a £3 voucher. The letter
went viral, and a few months later,
Sainsbury’s renamed the product.
Tiger Bread is Dead. Long live
Giraffe Bread.
Sources:
https://www.livechatinc.com/blog/best-customer-service-stories/
https://prezi.com/6ib9wzsfx3in/the-john-lewis-sleepover/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2094564/Giraffe-bread-Lily-Robinson-3-gets-Sainsburys-change-tiger-variety-viral-letter.html

PART 4
The Profit Centre Mindset
Systematically boosting your satisfaction scores

Profit centre mindset = investing in the relationship
From Cost Centre to Profit Centre
Most companies see their customer service team
as a pure cost centre. Like accounting—an expense
you have to incur to keep things going.
Even if they consider customer satisfaction as
paramount (and most do), they invest in the
customer relationship mainly through the lens
of reactivity: The customer called us, let’s give
them a better service: Better handovers between
agents, faster data availability, aiming for first-call
resolutions etc.
All that is great, and of course customers
appreciate if their issues are resolved faster.
“‘Our customers are invited guests to a party,
and we are the hosts.’ (Jeff Bezos). Change
your Customer Service mindset from a cost
centre to a profit centre.”
Click-to-tweet
But there’s another way to view Customer Service: As
something where you can proactively invest into the
relationship.
"We see our customers as invited
guests to a party, and we are the hosts.
It's our job every day to make every
important aspect of the customer
experience a little bit better."
- Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Micro-Rewards and incentives that Agents can provide to customers
• Give small gifts that make the customer feel valued, rewarded, and, if needed, apologised to.
• Make them as individual and specific to the individual customer as possible.
• Examples: A small pack of Haribo in the mail. A hot chocolate from Starbucks to beat the cold.
Building blocks of investing in the customer relationship
Empower the Customer
Service Agents
• Create 10-15 different rewards
agents can use off the shelf. Also,
create a process to expand the
range of gifts, whenever an agent
has a good idea.
• Assign a monthly budget to each
agent that they can spend.
• Provide them with good
examples for when to make use
of micro-rewards and incentives.
• A fast approval process for
larger reward requests (e.g. in
case the company made a big
mistake).
Communicate with
empathy
• Even if you’re formal in your
corporate communications,
don’t be corporate in how you
communicate to your individual
customers. You’re always dealing
with a person.
Size doesn’t matter
• To the contrary—a small reward
can be incredibly effective if it’s
personalised.
• Imagine this: “Hi Laura, I saw
on your account that your work
address is near Liverpool Street
Station. There’s a Costa in the
station. I’m sending you a Costa
voucher, have a brew on us
tomorrow morning.”
Delight customers
proactively, not reactively
• Unexpectedly—e.g. at the one-year
mark of being customers, send a
thank you gift, just like that.
• Semi-expectedly—e.g. on their
birthday, call them and give them a
free cinema ticket.
• Have their back and look out for
their best interest—proactively
suggest to move to a different
subscription plan when their usage
behaviour suggests it would be
better for them.

Examples — how companies delight their customers
Random acts of free overnight shipping that customers didn’t expect (Not sustainable forever, of course, as
the unexpected soon becomes standard). Example: Woman had foot pain and ordered six pairs of the same
shoe in different sizes, hoping that one of them would fit her. Zappos asked her why the six pairs, and she
explained her situation. The company responded with a bouquet of flowers and free VIP shipping.
—> Rewards are particularly effective when people are in a funk.
A utility company who provide 3% interest on customers’ overpayments.
Put a pack of Haribo into each
package. Not only a nice gesture but
also useful to their physically active
audience. (#sugar #energy #cycling)
Famous for their memorable purchase confirmation emails that make people smile.
Great customer support that stands in sharp contrast with its traditional banking competitors.
Trustpilot reviews collected in April
2018. We anonymised the scores to be
nice. But enter any well-known bank into
Trustpilot and see for yourself.
BANK 1 BANK 2 BANK 3
“It would never cross my mind to look for this. I never thought about what utility companies
do with my overpayments. But it’s a really nice move to pay me the interest on my credit — it’s
my money, after all.” - A current Tonik customer we spoke to

CDBaby once more
This story deserves the limelight. It perfectly exemplifies
what we mean with delighting customers at low cost.
CD Baby used to sell CDs (now they stream music).
In their check-out process, they added a box that asked
“Any Special Request?”. The company was known for
their sense of humour, and they wanted to see what
crazy ideas people would come up with.
One day, a customer placing his order was in a jaunty
mood, and the cover of his CD had a cartoon octopus on
it, so he typed into the box that he would like a rubber
squid with his order. If not available, real squid would do,
too. And then he forgot about it.
A few days later, his parcel arrived. Inside, right next to his CD, was a package of real dried squid fillets.
CDBaby had won a fan forever. And hundreds of thousands heard his story.
You can see the customer telling it here.

More ideas for great customer
service with micro-rewards
“It took us longer than 12 hours to
respond to your query—here’s a cuppa
on us.” Give a voucher for coffee chain.
“Thank you for booking your ticket to
Malta. Here’s a free kindle guidebook
for you.”
“It’s cold - REALLY cold. Have a
hot chocolate on us.”
“Thank you for buying travel
insurance from us. Here’s a film
voucher for Rakuten TV for when you
get back from your trip. Snuggle up
in front of the telly on a rainy Sunday
afternoon.”
“Thank you
for being our customer.
We love you.”
Send (useful) company swag out of the
blue without a particular reason —
branded post-it notes, a fridge magnet,
a power bank to charge a phone:
“Thank you for being our customer. We
love you.”
Give a free month of
Amazon Prime, just like that.

Do you want to get even more creative?
Check out Appendix 3 where we show you a snapshot
of the gift card options from our Rewards Hub product.
Using this tool, you can instantly give a gift card to your
customers in any amount you wish.
Learn more at
www.loyaltybay.co.uk/products/rewards_hub
or contact us at
enquiries@loyaltybay.co.uk
or call us on
(+44) 20 8626 3679.
“Proactively invest into the customer
relationship with unexpected micro-rewards
and tokens of appreciation.”
Click-to-tweet

At some point, you’ll be able to assign ROI
Imagine you do something great for customers—e.g. a gratitude email
campaign where you give them an Amazon Prime taster for a month.
You’ll end up with three groups.
Measuring CSAT, NPS and revenue
per customer repeatedly, you will be
able to measure the effectiveness of
each campaign.
That way, you will be able to
assign ROI on different rewards,
incentives and do more of those that
have a higher impact.
And not only that—you can also
create segments among your
audience and tailor offers to customer
groups as you get to know them.
Over time, you will develop rich insight into what your customers like.
Do this over and over again for every campaign you run.
= Measure NPS and average revenue per customer
Not opened email,
unaware of campaign
3.
Opened email,
not used taster
2.
Opened email,
used taster
1. TIME

Conclusion
We’ve covered a lot of ground. Here’s our journey so far:
1. Customer Service has a direct impact on revenue. 62% of B2B customers and 42% of B2C customers spend more
after a good experience.
2. The bar is rising—people are expecting flawless customer service. Therefore, doing well with the basics doesn’t cut it
any more.
3. For Customer Service Excellence, you need
a. A Marketing Mindset — Measure and Understand your Customer Satisfaction through NPS and CSAT surveys
b. A Butler’s Mindset — your agents need to be like Jeeves: Invisible yet available, quiet and discreet, anticipating
problems before they happen.
c. A Profit Centre Mindset — far from just being an expenditure, Customer Service is an opportunity to positively
impact the customer relationship. Give your agents the autonomy to provide little tokens of appreciation and
make them autonomous first-responders to customer problems.
4. Over time, these mindset changes will show up on your bottom line, and make you well known as a customer-centric
company with outstanding Customer Service.

PART 5
Getting managers on board

How to convince your manager to give
you the budget to implement these ideas
When we speak to clients, many tell us about their great ideas to improve their
Customer Service. But it’s impossible for them to get a budget for implementing
them. And they cannot use their existing budget because they need it to maintain
the status quo.
Unfortunately, that is just another example of not sharpening the saw and
continuing to cut down the tree with a tool that’s getting duller and duller.
So we thought that we would give you a one-pager with all the facts and
arguments that you need to have the conversation with your manager.
Print out the next page (or screenshot it and send it via email) and use it in your
discussion with your manager.
On the page after that, we have compiled a few objections you may face and how to
overcome them.

A case for investing in Customer Service
Good Customer Service leads to more revenue.
“To most people, Customer Service is more important than price.” (source: Econsultancy)
“Price sensitivity doubles as soon as the first negative customer service experience occurs.” (Salesforce)
“66% are willing to spend more with a company that provides great customer service.” (BI Intelligence)
“56% have stopped doing business with a brand due to a poor customer service experience.” (Microsoft)
We want stories like the following being told about us.
They are great PR, generate word of mouth, and lead to more revenue.
A fun-seeking customer asked CD Baby, a music etailer, for a squid to be added to his order.
To his great surprise, the company actually included a pack of dried squid fillet (which they
coincidentally happened to have in the warehouse) to the shipment. The customer’s story has
27,000 views on YouTube.
Bike etailer Wiggle is adding Haribo packages to their shipments.
Utility company Tonik Energy pays 3% of interest on customers’ overpayments.
Online bank Monzo has a Trustpilot score of
7.1 compared to high street banks’ average of 1.7.
Allofthese
areverylowcost
But to achieve this, we need to make a few changes.
Put differently, please give us the budget to invest into our customer relationship.
The changes we need
Let’s invest in the customer relationship by bringing a marketing and profit
centre mindset to Customer Service and grow our revenue.
Marketing Profit Centre
Measure and understand Invest and grow
We have to
(1) know what our customers think of us.
(2) do things that make them like us more.
(1) Collect Customer Satisfaction Scores
• After every 1-1 interaction
• After website visits
• After Customer Service campaigns (e.g.
loyalty rewards)
• On an ongoing basis
(2) Do things that our customers like
• Train and empower our agents to do the
right thing.
• Have a budget for random acts of
customer rewards.
• This will lead to growth in Customer
Satsifaction metrics.
Change our agents’ mindset.
Ensure that customer happiness comes before anything else.
Training
programmes
Empower agents to do the right thing.
They should not need to seek approvals for off-script solutions.
This includes budget decisions on how much spend is appropriate
per agent per month.
Process changes,
Budget Approval
Run campaigns, measure CSAT & NPS impact.
Like in Marketing, Customer Service will run reward and incentive
campaigns and measure the impact on CSATs and NPS.
That way, we can start determining the ROI of various proactive
activities and focus on what brings the best results.
Ongoing measurement & optimisation
CSAT and NPS growth leads to more revenue, so ideally we would
observe a quantifiable upside after a few months.
Repeat and optimise the process on an ongoing basis.
Process setup
Collect Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and
Net Promoter Score (NPS).
We need to know what our customers think.
That’s more than just the occasional email with a survey link—we
need to be more sophisticated than that:
Capturing across communication channels, defining which events
should trigger a survey, ensuring we don’t bother customers too
often, tracking score changes over time etc.
Process setup
WIN
GO
Process setup,
Budget Approval

Or just bossify it

Overcoming your manager’s objections
“You cannot just give CS agents a budget for gifts and rewards.
They will just send gifts to their friends.”
I trust my team. But beyond trust, we will do the following to
discourage abuse:
A. Agents will have to log every instance of a reward they gave,
and the reasons for it. We will perform spot checks on these
logs which will include a brief online search of the two names in
question together checking if the CS agent is friends with that
person on Facebook.
B. Because I trust them, I will not preventively admonish them to
not abuse it. But if someone gets caught abusing it, I will issue a
formal warning and fire in the second instance. This will serve
as sufficient discouragement of such behaviour.
“Fast service and first-call resolution is enough”
I wish this were so. But it’s already becoming the norm. Research
from Microsoft shows that 69% of people believe that customer
service is getting better. We’re up against an all-round rising
standard in Customer Service. It’s a reasonable hypothesis to
assume that having a Butler mindset and proactively giving small
tokens of appreciation will increase our Customer Satisfaction
Ratings and Net Promoter Score. And growing scores positively
impact revenue: 62% of B2B customers and 66% of B2C
customers buy more after a good Customer Service experience.
We also want to engineer such experiences. Many of our
customers (insert your figure here) never get in touch with
Customer Service, so we actually never have the opportunity to
impact these relationships positively. By being proactive about
our Customer Service, thinking like a butler and having a profit
mindset, we can create those positive touch points even if the
customer doesn’t contact us ever.
“This is going to be expensive”
It’s an investment. We will set up tools and processes to carefully
track our ROI on it. If we cannot prove ROI, we will stop doing it.
“Well, then run a small pilot test first. Let’s test your hypothesis
on a small scale.”
Sure, we can do that. The problem with our customer cycle is that
people only renew every X years / months. If we only want to
test the hypothesis that an increased CSAT / NPS will impact our
retention rate, then this might take up to two years to definitely
prove. Do we want to wait for such a long time? If we are scientific
about it, let’s be bolder. Let’s give the majority of customers the
great treatment and keep a small control group who will continue
on the current track—and then compare the retention rates of
both groups.
Did you get an objection that we haven’t covered?
Please let us know at enquiries@loyaltybay.co.uk.
Subject line “Customer Service eBook”.

How Loyalty Bay’s products can help you
delight your existing customers (1/2)
Rewards Hub Always-On Perks
A SaaS platform that you can sign up to instantly and send
a global selection of rewards to whomever you wish. We
provide full reporting and tracking.
A customer-facing, fully branded website.
Set targeted reward triggers throughout the
customer lifecycle.
Loyalty Bay customers
see a 28% improvement
in retention.
Turn negative
experiences into
positive ones.
Reward your customers
with hundreds of
exclusive rewards.
Learn more here:
www.loyaltybay.co.uk/products/rewards_hub
Learn more here:
www.loyaltybay.co.uk/products/always_on_perks
Email
communications
and printed collateral.
Rewards personalised
to your demographic
and customer base.
24/7 Rewards,
available via a
branded website.
Contact us at enquiries@loyaltybay.co.uk or call us on (+44) 20 8626 3679.

How Loyalty Bay’s products can help you
delight your existing customers (2/2)
Zapier Integration Send rewards automatically
without the need for developers
Send rewards within any app you use.
When a customer clicks
on a link in an email
Send them a £3 Costa gift
card from Loyalty Bay
When a customer
completes a survey on
SurveyMonkey
Send them a £7 Pizza
Express voucher from
Loyalty Bay
Learn more here: www.loyaltybay.co.uk/products/zapier_integrations
Contact us at enquiries@loyaltybay.co.uk or call us on (+44) 20 8626 3679.
Reward any action
you can think of.
Connect Rewards
Hub to an app of your
choosing via Zapier.
Configure your
reward campaigns
in Rewards Hub.
Examples

Tools we recommend1
(1) We don’t have a commercial affiliation with these companies. We recommend them because we use them ourselves or have heard good things about them.
Zendesk
Intercom Qualtrics
Zendesk is a cloud-based help desk solution.
One of the leaders in the field, Zendesk has
recently undergone a rebrand and added
lots of new features. (We like them but FYI
they only have a Trustpilot Score of 4.1/10)
Intercom is a messaging tool that allows you to
customise when and how you engage with site
visitors. Communicate with customers when they
come to your website and need immediate help.
(Trustpilot Score 6.9/10)
A tool to collect and analyse data about your customers’
behaviour. Customer satisfaction surveys, user
behaviour reporting, sentiment analysis from text, and
much more. Aptly, they are widely praised for their
Customer Service. (Trustpilot Score 9.1/10)
Hubspot
The granddaddy of marketing automation tools, Hubspot
have recently added Customer Service to their toolset.
Their Customer Hub includes automated feedback and
NPS, sentiment analysis, churn forecasting, and testimonial
capture. We haven’t tested it ourselves, but usually Hubspot
products are top notch, so we’re happy to give them a
thumbs up. (Trustpilot Score 5.3/10)

Sources
Customer Service matters more than price:
https://econsultancy.com/reports/multichannel-customer-experience-report
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2013/04/myth-great-customer-service-enhances-margins.html
http://uk.businessinsider.com/customer-service-experiences-are-more-important-than-ever-in-the-age-of-e-commerce-2016-3
Microsoft’s 2017 State of Global Customer Service Report
http://info.microsoft.com/rs/157-GQE-382/images/EN-CNTNT-Report-DynService-2017-global-state-customer-service.pdf
Dimensional Research and Zendesk - Customer Service and Business Results: A Survey of Customer Service From Mid-Size Companies
https://d16cvnquvjw7pr.cloudfront.net/resources/whitepapers/Zendesk_WP_Customer_Service_and_Business_Results.pdf
Conversocial’s State of Digital Care in 2018
https://www.conversocial.com/hubfs/2018-State-of-Digital-Customer-Service.pdf
Boost Survey Response Rates through Incentives
https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/offer-survey-incentives-without-sacrificing-good-data/
Butler characteristics:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8050598/Butler-training-Will-that-be-all-madam.html
https://www.colonialdomestics.com/domestic-staffing/3-qualities-to-look-for-in-a-great-butler/
Butler Customer Service stories
https://www.livechatinc.com/blog/best-customer-service-stories/
https://prezi.com/6ib9wzsfx3in/the-john-lewis-sleepover/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2094564/Giraffe-bread-Lily-Robinson-3-gets-Sainsburys-change-tiger-variety-viral-letter.html
Lumberjack story adapted from Stephen R. Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”

Appendix 1 - How to calculate the Net Promoter
Score (1/2)
Here’s the simplest way of calculating NPS.
The respondents are asked to rate their customer service experience (or their general feeling towards the company)
on a scale of 0 to 10. Respondents who score the company at 6 or less are considered detractors—they are likely to
associate negative feelings with the brand and share them with others. They are detrimental to your brand.
Respondents at 7 and 8 are considered passives (neutral towards you), 9 and 10 are promoters (likely to speak
positively about you).
“How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?”
NET PROMOTER SCORE = %
Promoters
%
Detractors( - )x 100
DETRACTORS PASSIVES PROMOTERS

The result is then plotted on a scale from -100 to +100
EXAMPLES:
• 25 promoters, 10 passives, 15 detractors. Total 50 respondents. NPS is 20
• Formula: (% promoters - % detractors) * 100 = (50% - 30%) * 100 = 20
• 50 promoters, 0 passives, 0 detractors. NPS is 100
• 5 promoters, 15 passives, 30 detractors. NPS is -50
Ongoing measurement results in a time chart, allowing you to track progress, set goals and see the
impact of specific Customer Service initiatives, both on an individual customer level and in aggregate.
Time
18-hour service
outage
Rewards
campaign
NetPromoterScore50
25
Appendix 1 - How to calculate the Net Promoter
Score (1/2)

Appendix 2: Sainsbury’s Giraffe Bread Letter
- A great example of Butler mindset

Appendix 3: Loyalty Bay - a snapshot of some of our
gift card options in our Rewards Hub product
Want to use Rewards Hub to boost your Customer Service?
Just get in touch, we will help you set up:
enquiries@loyaltybay.co.uk (+44) 20 8626 3679
Or learn more at www.loyaltybay.co.uk/products/rewards_hub

22 Tudor Street, London, EC4Y 0AY
(+44) 20 8626 3679
enquiries@loyaltybay.co.uk
www.loyaltybay.co.uk

The ultimate guide to customer service excellence

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