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In this environment, the service functions
of many organisations find themselves overstretched
and undervalued and often become the first target for
cost-reduction programmes.
Through our benchmarking and consulting work
we commonly observe three key
service management challenges that contribute to
this.
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A difficulty expressing the benefits of
customer service in financial terms and assessing the
true cost of poor
service. This presents obstacles when
trying to cost-justify investments in service
improvement initiatives and when trying to explain in
business terms
why customer satisfaction is important
-
Organisational hierarchies and
departmental structures still create barriers and
bottlenecks to customer processes in many organisations.
There appears to be an absence of formalised customer
retention strategies and frameworks for
customer-driven value creation. This leads to
an imbalanced investment bias towards activities that focus
on, more costly, customer
acquisition strategies instead
-
A lack of actionable customer
research and poor use of customer feedback
as a systematic source of insight for business
improvement and service management. In many cases
this contributes to the stress of service management,
introduces inconsistencies in service and leads to
larger organisations either "flying blind" or
developing an
overreliance on less robust performance measures.
These factors form key challenges for
service management and barriers for success for any
organisation in today's economic climate. Now, more
than ever, private and public sector organisations must
empower service management to build a customer-driven
enterprise that can remove these barriers, seek out
and fix the problems that customers experience and
outperform their competition. |
