Service in the Customers' Eyes: What Works, What Doesn't and How it Contributes to High Performance

Customer service has long been recognized as an area that has a significant impact on a company's top and bottom lines. This Accenture survey examines the reasons for companies' poor customer service and provides recommendations on how to improve this capability and achieve high performance.

Despite significant investment in technology, companies are making little impact on the quality of the customer service they offer.

Accenture conducted a survey of more than 2,000 people across the United States and the United Kingdom. The survey explored several key issues, including:

• Satisfaction with different methods of customer service.
• Impact of technology on service quality.
• Most frustrating aspects of dealing with customer service representatives.
• Actions taken in response to bad service.
• Most important aspects of a satisfying customer service experience.

Responses from survey participants indicate opportunities for companies to improve their customer service and progress toward high performance.

Some of the findings are:

• Customers in the United States and the United Kingdom spend an average of six minutes on hold when seeking assistance via a telephone help line.
  
  
• Eighty-seven percent of participants said they speak to multiple representatives when calling customer services.
  
  
• Respondents are frustrated by representatives' inflexibility, slowness to respond and non-personable nature as well as the lack of customized solutions being offered.
  
  
• Sixty-two percent of respondents disagree that technology has helped customer relationship management.
  
  
• Forty-two percent of lower-income respondents agree that technology has improved service.
  
  
• Sixty percent of all survey participants said they were satisfied with in-person customer service.
  
  
• Nearly half of our survey respondents said they have switched providers in the past year because of poor customer service.
  
  
• Thirty-four percent of participants said that they had a satisfying customer experience when representatives assisted with all needs rather than forwarding a request to different representatives.

In the quest to achieve high performance, companies have invested millions of dollars on customer relationship management to improve the way they service customers.

Many of these companies invested mainly in new technologies that largely removed live human interaction from the service experience. While these technologies met the cost-saving goal, they did not improve the service experience or quality, and in some cases they alienated customers altogether.

Interestingly, two industry segments that are well-known for their customer service struggles—airlines and cable/satellite television providers—were among those switched least by participants in our survey.

The aspects critical to a good service experience are as follows:

• Ability to discuss problems with representatives.
• Amount of time it takes to resolve a problem.
• Quality of the response from the representatives.
• Customer service representatives' manner and approach.

The survey responses suggest steps companies can take to improve their own customer service activities and provide the satisfying service experience that customers seek—and which will help them achieve high performance.

The first step should be boosting customer insight capabilities—with the understanding that it is impossible for a company to provide customers with great service if it doesn't know anything about them. To do so, a company must create a single view of the customer, which typically depends on having a data warehouse into which all relevant data—often widely dispersed throughout the organization—is fed. By combining a customer's transaction history with key data a company can transcend the one-dimensional, internal picture of a customer that purchase history alone provides.

A company can further empower its service representatives by providing them with more sophisticated and relevant career development programs. This, coupled with better training and performance support, will lower costs and increase customer loyalty.

Finally, access to integrated customer data, more robust tools and better training can improve representatives' ability to customize solutions to specific customers—as well as recognize and maximize an opportunity to cross- or up-sell.