What is Your Long-term Strategy for Customer Service?

Improving customer service is a goal for any customer-facing organization. Yet establishing this as a goal and actually accomplishing it through efficient and effective strategy is something altogether different. Unfortunately, too many companies think about solving the customer’s issue today with a sale, instead of improving their position for the long-term.

It’s common knowledge that acquiring a new customer is much more expensive than keeping a current one. In fact, as highlighted in a blog post by business VoIP and virtual PBX provider Nextiva, regardless of the cost of the new customer acquisition, it’s always seven times more expensive than keeping the existing customer. The question to ask in the development of the strategy is what is needed to satisfy the customer that stays with a company for the rest of their life.

Nextiva recommends three methods to accomplish this goal: do not oversell, be patient and create a demanding customer. The first recommendation is an easy one -- don’t overpromise on a product or service -- but instead make a suggestion based on the need it addresses for the customer. This focuses on their lifetime value, or what the customer will spend with a company over their lifetime.

Patience is probably one of the most important characteristics in the customer/vendor relationship. The company that only cares about closing the deal and moving on will quickly have to move on to another name, location and industry. In other words, it’s not an effective strategy for survival. The salesman that spends all of his time closing and none of it cultivating relationships will never be able to move past the closing stage of his career to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

Creating a demanding customer seems like a road most may want to avoid, yet there is a strategy here. If a company creates customers that have very high expectations, it prevents them from leaving a company. Competitors will find it difficult to steal the customer away as the demands seem too high.

Once you’ve established the quality of care you plan to deliver to the customer base, you also need to determine how you will handle the return. A customer unhappy with a purchase will want to return it and how you handle that interaction will determine whether or not he or she is a return customer. Some of the biggest retailers in the world have designed their return policies around customer satisfaction.

Based on industry success, there are a few rules to follow when determining your customer return policy. Take the return if you want your customer to return; design the return policy around customer buying habits; and offer flexibility. Always keep in mind that the focus is on how you will satisfy the customer in the future and the return is just one stop in the long-term relationship.

As long as the focus is on customer satisfaction, each interaction should be easy to manage and will contribute to higher revenue and greater profitability in the future.