Today, our customers have many ways to reach us to request service or buy our products and services. The escalation in social media marketing usage and quantity of sites available to reach us has made it much simpler for the customers to provide us feedback. What this has done is enhance the bar, raise our customers’expectations as they relate genuinely to response time, how fast we respond to their needs, questions, issues and concerns. We could manage the consumer experience, irrespective of exactly how we communicate using them, by creating and implementing a customer support plan aligned with this business management and growth plans.

In their seminal article on the hyperlink between service and profit, “Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work”, the Harvard Business Review authors found that the five percent escalation in customer loyalty has got the potential to provide a profit increase of anywhere between twenty-five and eighty-five percent. This is significant. Why wouldn’t every organization seek to construct a customer support plan and process that increased their profit? The firms cited by these authors could increase their profits, Telus webmail outage not only by improving the degree of customer support they provided, but by improving how many loyal customers they serve. They try this by carefully selecting their customers, understanding and meeting these customers’individual needs and interests, and; often engaging these customers in delivery of the item or service. And they organize themselves into cross-functional teams where team members understand the purpose of the organization, practice behaviours and implement actions necessary to help keep customers loyal. This’ownership mentality’encourages team members to construct relationships with the selected customers and treat them as their particular customers.

Bain and Company, within their work with Fred Reichheld’s concepts in his book “The Ultimate Question 2.0”, developed and implemented The Net Promoter System to measure customer satisfaction. The outcome of their case studies show traditional customer care measurement tools don’t deliver because the outcomes may not make it back to leading line employees in an appropriate fashion. These studies also identified that companies won’t be able to… “achieve or sustain high customer loyalty with no cadre of engaged employees.”

So just how do we, as business leaders and managers, produce a better customer support experience? What can we take from the study shared by the Harvard Business Review authors and Bain and Company researchers that can help us to enhance our customer relationships and build customer loyalty?

We could try this by creating a customer support plan, a customer support plan that’s an integral section of our business plan where we identify the consumer market we must develop to boost loyalty and drive up profits.

We have conducted our personal research on customer support excellence with thirty Canadian organizations and, as a result of this research, we created the’Customer Satisfaction Practices Continuum’- a type for evaluating the consumer service level of the organization (or any unit in a organization). This continuum outlines five stages for evaluation, each stage has three components - customer focus, measurement and environment. By completing the assessment, an organization can quickly assess their position on the continuum and decide if, they would like to implement the mandatory actions to move to another, far better stage. This enables business leaders and managers to balance customer support with profitability and build a customer support plan aligned making use of their business direction and goals with the degree of customer support they think is appropriate. Building customer loyalty can be expensive if investment in methods and action plans outstrips anticipated revenue. Customer support excellence isn’t about meeting every customer need but instead identifying those customers with whom we could build a connection and providing our employees with the information, tools, processes and systems they need to continue to nurture these relationships. This can lead to customer referrals, the best and most affordable approach to all.

Ultimately, it is focused on growing the business enterprise and driving up profits. One of the best ways to get this done is to cultivate relationships between your employees and your visitors as the study clearly demonstrates customer loyalty is indeed one of the utmost effective ways to drive up revenues and increase profit.