According to CRM Daily, businesses—especially retailers—are discovering that they make more money if they offer better service and they say it’s primarily because they’re taking the extra time to find out all the additional ways their customers are trying to buy from them.
Strange that retailers are just now waking up to this, because the buzz about Customer Service and Support (CS&S) has been simmering for some time, at least in the CRM world. In fact, back in March 2006, Jupiter Research changed the name of its blog category from CRM to Customer Service and Support.
We’ve known about service and support forever. We fully remember when Clarify, Inc. was renowned for its great responsiveness to its users, which was very appropriate for a market giant selling the front-office and back-office software that customer-facing agents fell in love with.
Dovetail was a great part of Clarify’s responsiveness of course – we catered to special requirements, and customized the Clarify product so that users could meet more needs with it.
Clarify notoriously lost its focus on the specific needs of its user base, as the company was bought twice, and amalgamated into larger strategies. Dovetail took up the torch thrown away, as they say, and created its own standards-based applications to modernize Amdocs Clarify, using its .NET platform, with business logic exposed in more than 500 APIs, and Web Services that can create a universe of custom procedures for thin clients and portals. (Check out the Dovetail history.)
This nimble and forward-facing approach is what the Clarify users wanted and weren’t getting from Amdocs – no surprise that the Clarify install base is shrinking, and Dovetail’s is growing. Dovetail is emulating the retailers by staying in conversation with its users to know what they need, and then provide it.
It’s good that the retailers are rediscovering customer service, because they can be very precise in measuring the dollar increases in sales, and the ROI from paying attention to customers.
The growing trend across all enterprises is towards better service and support as a reality that everyone can derive tangible benefit from. You want to be known by your customers as one of the Ten Best Companies for Customer Service, not as one of the ten worst, which get all the public comments in CRMLowdown’s story, demonstrating the viral force of neglecting customer service and support.
And what about Wal-Mart?
“Yet amid all that retailing success, customer service was lost. “Logistics improvements need heavy investments, and customer service fell by the wayside,” says Eric Nelsen, a director at Mercer Management Consulting. In a survey last year by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, poor customer service topped the list of what people disliked about Wal-Mart.”
These retailers will find, as have other commercial enterprises, that they now need powerful and customizable service and support applications just as badly as they once needed ruthlessly efficient logistics solutions.
