Customer Experience – Trade-off between customer loyalty and increasing efficiency

The fact that the importance of customer satisfaction and loyalty is high on the management agenda is confirmed by the positive development of loyalty programmes. But in addition to the goal of improving customer experience, companies also have to ensure that customer service is handled as efficient as possible.

The fact that the importance of customer satisfaction and loyalty is high on the management agenda is confirmed by the positive development of loyalty programmes. More and more companies are investing directly in customer experience and are relying on a customer loyalty program or are planning to introduce such a program.

Figure: Share of companies with a loyalty program

In addition to the goal of improving customer experience and loyalty, companies also have to ensure that customer service is handled as efficient as possible. Digitalization is the keyword and has a profound impact on processes and technologies in the service center. For example, many innovative technological solutions are developed and installed to support the most important communication channel: the voice channel (a detailed list can be found in the report).

Artificial intelligence (AI) is also a promising new technology that is being implemented and used, especially in the further development of self-services. The figures collected in our survey indicate that management is already aware of this. For example, 25 percent of the service center in our survey already use instruments with AI or are in a pilot phase.

Figure: Use of applications supported by AI

Nevertheless, the use of self-service in customer service has stagnated over the last two years. Maybe because of the complexity of customer requests.

It is interesting to see the significant differences in the use of self-service by industry, with the information and communications industry playing a leading role. The percentages of reduced employee contacts through self-services are shown below.

Figure: Reduction of contacts through self-services across different industries

Detailed information and solutions for the trade-off between customer loyalty and increasing efficiency can be found in the Service Excellence Report 2019

The Service Excellence Report 2022 is available!

We are pleased to present the ninth report of the Service Excellence Cockpit. Once again, over 200 service organizations from numerous European countries took part in this year’s survey. Most participants come from the DACH region, but there are also more and more service centers from other European countries that are interested in the results of our report and therefore decide to participate in the survey.

Service Excellence – Increased strategic importance of customer management

Companies are increasingly understanding the potential of a professional customer management and are obviously also willing to invest. The main reason for this trend is a desire to differentiate on the basis of excellent customer experiences.

A 10% increase of employee satisfaction results in a 3% increase of customer satisfaction!

Everybody is talking about digitalization an machine learning, but now we can prove that you cant ignore the human touch within customer management. Customer service is most succesfull if the employees are motivated!