Ten Service Myths March 31st, 2009 by Christopher Musico

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Greetings from the Customer Experience Summit here in the Windy City — Chicago. The conference, just a stone’s throw away from Soldier Field and Lake Michigan, is focusing in on not just delivering service, but a superior customer experience to an ever demanding customer base.

Check out our Web site for daily news postings from the event over the next couple of days. In a session this afternoon, “Going From Good to Great Service While Saving Money: Using the Voice Of The Customer to Drive Brand Aligned Service,” John Goodman, vice chairman of TARP Worldwide (not to be mistaken for the government bailout), pointed out ten myths of customer service that must keep in mind in order to evolve.

1. Always exceed customer expectations.
2. If you answer the phone the quickest, that alone is the key to success.
3. People always prefer talking to people.
4. The customer is always right.
5. If complaints are down, customer service is better.
6. Employees are the cause of the most dissatisfaction.
7. Price and cost cutting are the keys to success.
8. If your company is at 90 percent satisfaction, you should declare a victory.
9. If you measure Net Promoter Score, you are done insofar as analyzing your customer loyalty.
10. If you have a 100 percent satisfaction guarantee, everyone is happy.

“The law of diminishing returns does not really apply when it comes to customer experience,” Goodman pointed out.

For customer service managers and supervisors out there, do you believe that these ten points are truly myths? Are you still operating under these maxims? Are there any myths here that you’d either like to debunk or add to?

Tags: Chicago, contact center, contact center agent, CRM, CRM magazine, CSR, customer experience, customer experience management, Customer Experience Summit, customer service, customer service representative, IQPC, Lake Michigan, Net Promoter Score, NPS, Soldier Field, TARP Worldwide

3 Comments »

When your customers trust you, they will reward you with their loyalty. I watched all 10 of them and got some great tips. Jason Price Comment by Jason Price — — April 3, 2009 @ 7:04 am

We strive to answer the phone as quickly as possible, but there is always someone that think we were not quick enough. We have been using online chats to help more customers simultaneously. It has helped tremendously with the average hold time for clients calling in, and improve customers’ satisfaction with the faster response time. I wouldn’t say that this alone is the key to success because this is only one facet of interactions with the customers. Great customer experience is a company culture where every employee is on the same page and provide a great and consistent experience for customers. Comment by Anh — — April 3, 2009 @ 9:57 am

Customer loyalty is such an overused term today. Every brand wants it and the common thinking seems to be to just launch a card based loyalty program to buy customer loyalty. In fact recent reports from Forrester find an increasing emphasis on customer experience and a payoff in terms of customer retention. It is of course much harder to truly create a strong customer experience. Inadvertently companies make it more difficult for customers to engage and do business with them. How often in a bank, the relationship manager does not have a single view of all your financial investments with the same bank!! But make no mistake about it, building a superior customer experience is a difficult task and often “silo” based organization structures come in the way. Comment by Jason Fernandes — — April 14, 2009 @ 2:49 am

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