business essay service

business essay service

The Impact of Quality Customer Service on Business Success

1. Introduction to Customer Service in Business

Excellent customer service is often cited as a competitive advantage for companies with a sophisticated service strategy. After-sales service cannot be purchased off the shelf and is not easy to implement: it is reliant on the cultivation of relationships with key clients. Although efficient quality customer service is often identified as a decisive factor in the success of small or medium-sized manufacturing companies, there is limited evidence of how these companies implement customer service into their firm’s strategy. This paper presents how small or medium-sized companies implement customer service into their business strategy and how it impacts their success, or business performance. The scope of “customer service” in this article includes “pre-sales services”, “purchase”, and “after-sales service services” of a product or company offer.

A survey of U.S. small business owners found that 98% of businesses with 5 to 19 employees provided good customer service, and 91% said satisfied customers were the key to their success. Yet, most small or medium-sized companies have difficulty with managing customer service due to limited resources. The companies do not have enough employees to attend to customer service and customer inquiries. It creates a bottleneck in the customer service and can be overwhelming for employees. Moreover, small or medium-sized companies are not yet organized enough to handle customer service and consider customer service to be beyond their capacity. This makes them focus more on maximizing sales because it is the main priority for the company’s revenue.

2. The Benefits of Quality Customer Service

Enhancing communication: – Effective communication helps businesses to learn and fulfill the needs of customers and enriches the real experience of customers. Increasing motivation and teamwork: – Good customer service mindset can be the foundation of a win-win scenario for all members of the organization. Long-term business success can bring substantial satisfaction and opportunities for all business units and thus enhance the motivation of the units and the overall performance of the business.

Service recovery: – The customer service can create a positive emotional impact when it can recover the situation of something that has gone wrong. – Effective service recovery can increase the satisfaction and loyalty of customers to the business.

Customer satisfaction: – Customer satisfaction is the overall leading indicator of how successful the business is. Profit and success are also derived from customer satisfaction. – Well-satisfied customers can bring additional customers to the business because referral business from satisfied customers can cost less and bring higher profitability compared with a response to an inquiry from advertisement.

Building trust, respect, and loyalty: – It creates customer trust and respect for business’s products, which can bring higher loyalty and attractiveness of the business. – Trustful, respectful, and loyal customers can bring long-term benefits and long-standing assets for the business because the repeat value of these customers can be worth multiple the initial value of the customers.

Creating value: – It creates value in products and services for customers. – It creates unique products and services that can potentially bring higher profits.

Quality customer service can play an important role in businesses since it creates value for customers, satisfies their needs, and promotes prosperity of enterprises. The overall benefits of providing good customer service can be outlined as follows:

3. Strategies for Implementing Effective Customer Service

Customer-friendly service with a unified approach should permeate every unit, every position and every job in the business. Support techniques and various ways of waking up, developing, nurturing, supporting, advancing, and holding high customer-service expectations from workers should be interrelated and interchangeable. The quality of the team cannot rise above the quality of the chief executive who selects international and customer-oriented strategies. Staff must demonstrate customer satisfaction and be knowledgeable of the customer concept across the management consensus of a diverse work force. They should possess vital leadership characteristics, be trained, educated, elevated, and evaluated as models of the excellent personnel practices they expect of and project toward the outside customer.

The development of a successful orientation towards customer service should be disparate, mission-driven, solid from the top down, flexible and adaptive at every level. The approach should feature high self-esteem among staff members, so that they in turn may project high self-esteem towards the outside consumer. Clearly, customer-oriented results can be guided and enhanced by the presence of excellent personnel policies and programs, supported by fair employee practices. Employee satisfaction will enhance consumer satisfaction. Internal service to employees will enhance the customer service that radiates outward toward the general public.

4. Measuring and Improving Customer Service Performance

Because such feedback is difficult to collect and interpret, some organizations ignore it – in the case of major tendering work and patient surveys, no assessment of satisfaction is made. But where there is no information about customer perceptions, the firm may be actually investing to meet the different agenda of interested parties such as shareholders – contributing to the shareholder/stakeholder debate throughout exploring why and how the quality measures are used, reporting back to the interested parties on investigated customer satisfaction alongside current and future prospects. More intangible indicators of good customer service include high employee satisfaction, pay levels, and levels of emotional commitment. The presence of these elements can be indicated, not surprisingly, through employee surveys, in conjunction with high scores for recruitment, retention, and training attributes.

It is generally considered impossible to produce a single measure for the quality of a firm’s customer service – and reflecting the score in one performance indicator, such as those in the shareholder’s report or annual return, is indeed invariably taken with a very large pinch of salt. A multi-capture approach is needed. Output and process measures for customer service may be collected and presented in the firm’s annual report. Improvements in customer service may show up in higher market shares, revenues, or quality-adjusted prices. Direct feedback is available from the customer in the form of customer surveys and/or complaints and compliments.

5. Case Studies and Examples of Successful Customer Service Initiatives

Note: Sometimes businesses operating within communities or within specific contexts have it much easier than, say, a larger corporate faced with the challenges of preserving its standards of customer service amongst hundreds or even thousands of customers or clients every day.

– British Airways ‘Any Questions’ Feed. To reduce customer calls (and thereby reduce customer waiting times), British Airways introduced an ‘Any Questions?’ feed on the front of the website so that immediate answers to most customer questions can be found, served up 24/7. – Alawoona Outback Retreat’s Tea and Coffee Offer. Guests at the Alawoona Outback Retreats are offered take-home bags of their preferred coffee or tea as a courtesy for choosing to stay at their bed and breakfast. Plans are to take the breakfast coffee and morning paper to the accommodation by car in the future! – The Library Hotel’s Book Exchange. At the Library Hotel, small groups of people staying in the hotel get together each evening to chat over cheese and wine for an hour in the afternoon. The hotel provides library blister boxes for rounds of take one, leave one. Great marketing synergy! By offering extra touches of service, you surprise and delight people – something that these customers seem to remember beyond the normal value chain of the business exchange.

Providing excellent customer service is vital for all businesses, large and small. These are just a few examples where customers have appreciated the small things businesses have done for them and spent time and effort in thanking the providers of excellent customer service. They are all excellent examples of how fantastic customer service can make a real difference.