Service-Ability: Create a Customer Centric Culture and Achieve Competitive Advantage

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BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

Britain has an overwhelmingly service-orientated economy. Today, we do things rather than make things as a source of revenue, and more than ever before the way we deliver what we produce is an essential component of what customers buy. This holds true even for manufactured product, not just service-product, and is irrespective of where the product originates. Whether from the private, public or third sectors, truly customer-satisfying service always adds value.

The competitive differentiators of the past are now taken as givens. Product quality, ‘right first time’, or business processes reengineered for maximum efficiency, important as these things are, are no longer enough. They are no longer able to make the tangible product or the service-product offering stand out from another as they used to do. Only by enhancing these with exemplary customer service will organizations achieve better customer retention, lower costs of staff replacement and be able to build their brand value through better reputations.

There is now overwhelming evidence to suggest that profit is directly linked to customer service. That consumers form opinions and make judgements about an organization based on the employees with whom they interact is just a simple truth; the process is packed with all the basic issues that exist in human relationships and interactions. Customer service is about how the customer experience is dramatized – how it is acted out on the stage of the customer ...