So often we hear talk of:

‘customer satisfaction’

but we all know, as customers, that when we’re ‘merely satisfied’, we are more likely than not to look out for other providers of those goods or services: either consciously on unconsciously.

In fact, recent research from Coca Cola found that 80% of customers are ’satisfied’ with existing suppliers or brands at the very moment they switch to a new one!

We know this is true: if we go out for a meal, and come away ’satisfied’ (rather than ‘delighted’), we’re going to try somewhere else next time.

Some other fascinating customer service excellence conundrums include:

    * It costs at least 6 times as much to win new customers as it does to retain and delight existing customers (so it’s worth a bit of investment in time and money).

    * People tell everyone they can about poor customer service, but only 1 or 2 about great customer service (so you have to be ‘great’ MUCH more than you’re ‘poor’!)

    * Investment in service excellence pays a great dividend: the greatest advertising in the world, in any business, is world of mouth (just ask Google).

    * Figures suggest that a 1% increase in customer loyalty can have as much benefit to your business as a 10% reduction in costs.

So the ONLY (yes, the ONLY) way to LONG TERM business and organisational success is to have your stakeholders, your mission, your strategy, your processes, your systems all aligned around the delivery of outstanding customer service as the norm. If you don’t, it simply won’t work … because there’ll be a spanner in the works.

When you’ve done this, you need to measure the results (and we don’t mean the money, we mean the results of the actions that, if done right, will result in the money following!).

If you’d like some help with this, please do feel free to contact us for a no obigation chat.