Customer Service as a Growth Engine
A theme that’s popping up more and more with word of mouth marketers is the strategy of using customer service as the new marketing. Zappos has built its business around a customer service culture. Comcast has focused on customer service to help repair its brand image. And, Best Buy uses customer service as a differentiator.
At WOMMA’s recent School of WOM conference nearly every presentation from the keynotes to the breakout sessions touched up customer service as a way to make a brand more talkable.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Dana Mattioli writes about how “some executives see a chance to woo frustrated customers from rivals through word of mouth and by creating pleasant experiences.”
Mattioli details how Comcast is improving its customer service, resulting in satisfied customers, higher sales, and no doubt … more positive word of mouth.
“Cable provider Comcast is bolstering customer service operations in an effort to retain customers and sell higher-priced services. The company has been trying to improve customer service for the past couple of years, but it’s still a sore spot: earlier this year The Consumerist, a consumer issues website, granted Comcast its “Worst Company in America” award.
In January, Comcast started putting its 24,000 call-center agents through additional training and has told call-center supervisors to spend 70% of their time coaching their agents, more than double the amount of time they spent before. So far, Comcast says it’s seen a decrease in repeat customer calls—queries about the same problem—and in customer requests to speak to a supervisor.
‘Our primary focus has been on ensuring that we’re delivering superior customer service and that clears the way for us to be able to up-sell,’ says Tina Waters, senior vice president of customer operations at Comcast.”
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal article | June 7, 2010]
John, I agree that customer service/experience seems to be a new marketing trend. But I wonder if businesses are really thinking of this a strategy or as a tactic. Sort of like “Let’s try some customer service, it worked for Zappos.” As you pointed out though, with Zappo’s customer service was a natural manifestation of its culture. I don’t get the feeling that’s what’s driving this trend toward customer service.
Yes. Improving customer service has become a “best practice” companies are trying to do. To your point, the only way a company will truly realize long-lasting benefits is to bake customer service into how a business does business not just one day, but every day. If a company views this as a tactic du jour, they will see early results but those results will not last long because when the next “best practice” tactic rolls in, the company will lose its customer service focus for the next trend.
Excellent post, but I think what we are seeing, perhaps as a result of social media, is the power of customer service coming into a much more public space. Customer service is doing what is has always been doing, it is just now able to do it in a more vocal, open and empathetic way to truly respond to customers in a timely fashion. There is no doubt that social media places a brand/PR veneer on top of customer service, but it is fortunately not the new marketing.
We have an interesting conundrum, however, resulting from the use of social media within customer services. Companies are lauded for the good work they do in terms of how they use social media to respond to customer’s issues. However, the underlying issue that created the complaint in the first place, still goes unfixed.