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.

Companies are increasingly understanding the potential of a professional customer management and are obviously also willing to invest. The investment rate measures the average share of investment on total operating costs over the last 3 years. We see a very positive trend for the service centers in our survey.

Figure: Increasing investment rate over time

The main reason for this trend is a desire to differentiate on the basis of excellent customer experiences. Today, 78 percent of service center management describe the overall awareness of the service center within the company as very important or important. This is an increase of 9% compared to 2016.

Figure: Increasing strategic awareness of customer service

But that’s not all: In our data analysis, we find evidence that strategic awareness of customer service has an impact on business performance and customer experience. A more strategic awareness of customer service is correlates positive with customer satisfaction as well as the Net Promotor Score (NPS) and thereby the overall customer experience.

In concrete terms, this means that companies with a higher strategic awareness of their customer service (measured on a scale of 1 = very unimportant to 7 = very important) have a higher average customer satisfaction of 0.3 points (measured on a scale of 1 = very dissatisfied to 7 = very satisfied). We find consistent results for the Net Promoter Score. The NPS increases by an average of 4.2 points (scale from -100 to +100) when the strategic awareness of customer service increases by one category.

Figure: Effect of strategic awareness on NPS

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.

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.

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!