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Customers to the Core: Tactics for Successful Service (4 of 5)

Refining Products and Services

The best customer service is no customer service. That's right, good service is the kind that doesn't get used because it's not needed. The goal is to refine products and services so that they are easier to use and understand with every iteration. Successful customer-centered businesses must implement technologies that allow them to gain deep and meaningful understanding of their customers. The result is an organization equipped to develop the products and services its customers truly want and need. For all of you worried about ROI, here is where an initial investment in customer service will result in lower customer support costs down the line (via gathered and mined customer data.)

Companies must recognize that making useful and usable products and services is not an event or a project. It is an ongoing and continuous process. If properly utilized an eCRM data can facilitate continuous improvements web site architecture and navigation, product inventories, and product features and functions. Where ther is less flexibility in the product companies can bundle services to support customer needs.

There's a caveat: As I mentioned before, a state of the art enterprise-wide CRM implementation will not design better customer experiences, improve the quality of products, or develop future product strategies. Surely, CRM tools combined with your best market research data will tell you a great deal about your customers, but don't expect that you will have all of the information you need. Customer-Centered Businesses must utilize methodologies for customer understanding that go beyond the data gathered electronically using eCRM.

Customer-Centered Organizations

Customer-Centered Businesses must learn the difficult lesson that competitive advantage and future success lies squarely in the relationship with the customer and not in emerging technologies. While on the surface this seems easy enough, in practice it is quite challenging. Businesses and their employees often feel that they know their customers and can make unbiased decisions on their behalf. As a result they will select promising technologies to facilitate their personal perception of need combined with business case.

Not only does competitive advantage lie squarely with the customer, it also requires new research techniques that yield deeper understanding than the traditional business strategists are accustomed to with market research. Executives, business strategists and product managers alike must learn to collaborate with and embrace the softer sciences and methodologies of anthropologists, cognitive scientists, design strategists, and social scientists in order to gain the deeper levels of customer understanding.

A successful customer-centered business must have an organizational structure and culture in place that allows it to capitalize on technological advancements in Customer Relationship Management to the specific end of meeting customer wants and needs in the most efficient way possible. The organization must have a clear set of goals and a clear focus. In order to insure internal continuity across channels, departments and other organizational silos, the company must be focused on a unified and consistent customer experience.

This is not a new process. It is a culture, a philosophy and a way of doing business that permeates the entire organization-a customer-centric culture that thrives on empathy and learning about its customers. The organization must be able to mass customize its products and services to meet specific and unique customer needs and requirements. As the learning relationship continues to develop, the customer's needs become better and better understood and more and more products can then be customized to meet their changing needs.

Most organizations are not equipped to manage the complex customer relationships that confront them today. Their businesses have evolved or have been scaled from models designed for fewer customer touch points, clearer lines of communication with their customers and obvious straightforward competition. The responsibility for managing the relationships with the customers often rested with a single department or functional group. In the past this was fine. They knew their customers and their customers knew them.

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