“Treat your customer service people like gods,” says online business advisor Todd Alexander.
One of the conceits of the 1980s business model was that customer service, like training and capital investment, is an expense that should be driven down at all costs.
In corporations, government departments and politics those who dealt directly with the customers, taxpayers or voters were seen to be the low level, low status employees who could be outsourced at the first possible opportunity.
That was great when markets were growing and there was an abundance of low hanging fruit to be plucked from the marketplace.
Now that customers are cash strapped and margins are falling, keeping customers happy becomes more important.
A statistic often quoted is that acquiring a new customer costs five times more than keeping an existing one, that difference may be exaggerated but it’s not far from the truth.
Those departing customers can do great damage to the business as well.
In the 1980s customers had little recourse apart from taking their business elsewhere. Often they didn’t have that choice in sectors where duopolies reign.
Now customers can vent their frustrations to the world on the web or through social media and there’s no hiding from the loss of reputation.
What’s more, many of the businesses that relied upon picking the low hanging fruit of a growing economy, high immigration or increasing consumer debt to find more customers through the last thirty years now find the rules of changed.
Customer service now matters.
Any management that considers customer service to be low status is a dinosaur and will soon be following them.
It’s a good time to be disrupting comfortable business models.