Every year customer service teams gather vast amounts of research and feedback from customers. The information gathered in this way has phenomenal market value, yet all too often this research is not transferred to the business. It is unexploited and customer service skills are undervalued as a result.

Don't waste the value of customer service!

Find the hidden value
Understanding the customer is vital to both customer service and marketing. While customer service teams have a huge amount of contact with the customer, marketing departments don't have this opportunity.

Capture the soft information
At a recent conference, the customer service operations representative for a global company said they had up to 40 million contacts with the consumer each year. That's 40 million opportunities to find out vital information about what they want. Most of us are not running customer service on that scale, but even a single interaction can yield interesting and valuable insight.

Action: How does your customer service team capture soft information from customers and pass it on to the rest of the business? Even brief reviews of verbatim comments can deliver gems! If you have a large database of customers, try using a software tool that can generate themes from random comments. A simple search approach could be a good starting place.

Simple routes to sharing knowledge
Good customer service skills are not just confined to the customer service team. It is provided by every person within your organisation, from the receptionist to the CEO. One of our client runs a ‘voice of the customer' meeting every week

Action: How can those who have customer contact share what they find out with others? Try basic communications such as a monthly or quarterly exchange between customer service and marketing teams.

Be proactive with market research
Customer service teams can be proactive in conducting market research, not just remain passive in collecting data. What does marketing or product development need to know?

Action: Try conducting a simple piece of market research on a small scale via your customer service team. It will give you an idea of just how much you can find out at a very low cost.

Although it can be difficult to see the direct impact of good customer service skills on the bottom line, making the most of the valuable information you are already collecting is clearly a good step in maximising the value of your operation (and demonstrating return on investment in training). It is also relatively easy to put a market value on the information you collect, Just ask a market research company how much it might cost to collect such information for you.

The ROI Academy(TM) - special announcement
We don't normally use Management Voice to give you 3C news. However, on this occasion, we would like to offer you a sneak preview of our major new initiative. The ROI Academy(TM) will launch in 2007 with the prime purpose of helping organisations measure and maximise the value they receive from investing in people development (return on investment in training). We are partnering with academic institutions, software vendors and leading corporate managers to bring you proven models and processes that will support your ‘measure and maximise' projects.

With reference to today's Management Voice, The ROI Academy(TM) is offering an accreditation programme for customer service managers to model and measure the impact of their customer service operation on the bottom line. For more details about The ROI Academy(TM) click here

Management Voice Index
Subscribe to Management Voice