The Business Acumen Value of Customer Service

    

In the Digital Age where the continued investment of major capital has been focused on scalability, customer-service-business-acumen-skillsvolume, and growth, the concept of customer service has become a second-tier element of delivering the value proposition to customers.

During the past year, our team of Business Acumen learning facilitators who have been delivering award-winning business acumen learning solutions to our large global clients have also taken notice of how perplexed participants have been when thinking and applying concepts of customer service when executing decisions in our business simulation workshops.  As recently as last week, I had a conversation with a team of mid-level leaders about their questions on customer service and one of them half-kiddingly asked me if customer service actually still impacted the simulation as a demand driver and if they should even bother investing any money into it.

With these trends in mind, Advantexe’s core Enterprise Simulation Design team held a meeting to talk about the changes in beliefs about customer service and what if anything we should do to our core simulation models that teach participants to better understand strategic thinking, financial management, sales, operations, and financial results.

To help us decide on a course of action, we conducted some research to understand the current thinking on customer service and one of the most interesting sources of data on the topic was a recent PwC survey (below) on what people value the most in their customer experience.

customer-service-business-acumen

The data has dramatically changed our thinking about customer service and effective in our Q2 and beyond simulation models, the core demand drivers of the customer service algorithms will be updated to reflect the current drivers.

Here are three things that we learned that not only have an impact on teaching business acumen in our business simulations, but should have an impact on your business:

Customers Value Efficiency

The biggest surprise of this data is that customers now view efficiency as the #1 driver of the customer experience.  It’s not human interaction, it’s not a deep understanding of customer needs, it’s efficiency.  The implications are powerful and this led us to drill into the details of what that means. I think the best definition, and the disruptive learning, is that it means going to Amazon, finding your product right away, hitting one button, and getting your product the next morning.  With that expectation is a baseline or entry-ticket into doing business, the pressure to find more efficiencies will become intense,

Friendly Service

While efficiency has become the primary driver, friendly service still has significant relevance.  Being open, warm, caring, and emotionally aware of customer needs are ways of establishing friendly service and making sure that customers feel cared about and connected with.  The question now – as always – is what is driving friendly service? Is it training, culture, strategy, tools, people, processes?  All of the above?  It’s a critical question and one that should be part of Business Acumen skill development and strategic deployment.

Global Presence Doesn’t Matter as Much as it Once Did

We get it; it’s a global world and customers now expect global service as a normal course of business.  Investing in, and establishing global offices, operations, and commercial teams was something important in the late 1990s and into the early 2000’s but in 2018 and beyond if you don’t have an integrated global supply chain then you aren’t in business.  Positioning “global” as a “value add” is a big mistake and a waste of resources.  The recommendation here is to accept that global as part of doing business and that you should focus your efforts on efficiency, friendly service, and knowledgeable service.

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Robert Brodo

About The Author

Robert Brodo is co-founder of Advantexe. He has more than 20 years of training and business simulation experience.