Home >> Our research findings and insights >> Service management challenges

Our research findings and insights

Service management challenges

Today, more than ever, businesses and public sector organisations are under pressure to reduce costs and downsize resources to remain profitable or operate within their budgets.  Meanwhile, customers are becoming more sophisticated with increasing expectations, and markets offer customers increased competition and easier ways to switch supplier.

Many service functions become overstretched and undervalued and then become the first target for cost-reduction

  

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.

  • 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.

Building a customer-driven enterprise:

With effective planning, guidance and executive commitment, an organisation can make the transition from being at the mercy of these challenges to actively managing customer experience and creating value for its customers.

To support such transformations CTMA has developed a portfolio of customer experience measurement tools, methodologies and feedback systems.  Underpinning these services is a comprehensive framework for customer-driven value creation that provides organisations with a consistent and measurable business improvement strategy.

Many organisations regard customer complaints as an “inconvenience” and satisfaction research as no more than a form of “marketing intelligence”.  In doing so they fail to capitalise on the opportunity of using customer feedback as a management tool to improve their products, their services and their business.  CTMA has identified five important steps an organisation must take in order to fully exploit these opportunities, turn customer feedback into management actions, build an effective force against service management challenges and a defence against customer dissatisfaction.

© CTMA New Zealand Ltd.