Strategic Service Management

By Giacomo Squintani, Marketing Manager EMEA, Servigistics

Greetings from Paris.

That always sounds extravagant, doesn’t it? Well, don’t get carried away. I have a checkered history with accommodation in this beautiful city, and tonight’s tipped the balance the wrong way.

I am here for a two-day User Conference with our European Pricing customers. And ‘here’, more specifically, is the Radisson SAS near CDG: convenient, practical, respected. The sort of place you associate with good service; an impression that I have had reinforced in the past few weeks, during which I’ve dealt from afar with the hotel’s Commercial Department to get the event set up. Nothing has been too much trouble for them.

Then came tonight. I cleared customs, and duly waited for my shuttle bus at Terminal 2B. It’s a Sunday night, so I appreciate the service will be relatively infrequent. Some thirty minutes later though, having seen the Hilton’s shuttle go past me for the fourth or fifth time, it’s hard not to wonder.

A couple of hotel guests waiting with me are on the phone to the hotel, who assures them it’s ten minutes away. Trouble is, they had done that 25′ earlier - equally abruptly. Now it’s bad enough when expectations are mismanaged by the local pizza delivery joint: but this is a hotel brand that prides itself on service, leveraging it to charge a premium price. Does it know what’s going on? If not, why not? If so, why the blatant misinformation?

In the end, I waited 50′ for the shuttle. How long the other two guests waited, I daren’t imagine because when it finally arrived, there was only one seat available. Since they were travelling together, they kindly offered it to me. They weren’t as docile towards the driver or the hotel reception, over the phone. The waiting had been bad; the deceit, unnecessarily aggravating. I wouldn’t want to be in the driver’s shoes as he heads back to pick them up from here, which he seemed to be doing - even after Reception had guaranteed them another shuttle was already en route and would be with them five minutes after ‘mine’…

Whatever you sell, your customers are not idiots. Most customers tend to have greater patience than you may think. They accept things go wrong - indeed, fix their problems well and their loyalty will be higher than had they never existed. That’s why Dell showcases its Enterprise Command Center to illustrate how it helps its customers: because doing so exceptionally well is a true competitive differentiator.

What customers don’t accept is being lied to. That’s just insulting. While it’s no more insulting than it ever was, it is easier to get found out, since there are just too many sources of information available for customers not to verify what they’re being told. And it’s too easy for customers to share their dissatisfaction within minutes, as you are proving by reading this.

If you can’t always be truly exceptional, at least always be exceptionally true.

by Giacomo Squintani, Marketing Manager, EMEA

From the moment you first sent an e-mail, you knew that things were never going to be the same again, at home or at work. With the Holiday Season truly upon us, are you escaping those checkout queues and putting on a Christmas CD as you surf for gifts? If, like me, you are (well, minus the CD), you are a challenge – to the retail marketers for whom seasonal in-store promotions and glitzy shop windows are of no use.

Of course, many of those skills have been successfully transferred to e-mail – and enhanced in the process. But what about our less frivolous investments – those that are set to last a few years (the Web 2.0 age equivalent of what our parents would call a “lifetime”)? What are the implications for us – both as marketers and customers?

Research in Motion experienced one such implication quite clearly in the UK recently. As they launched their BlackBerry Storm model with a marketing campaign worthy of its name, they could not foresee the online backlash. In particular, popular comedian and TV personality Stephen Fry caught the imagination with a Twitter comment – and, while he made a point of stating that “Yes, I blame n’works more than RIM”, his paragraph “Problems are terrible lag: inaccurate t’screen, awful, slow and fiddly text input. I SO wanted to like it” was still sufficient for the BBC to ask: “Can Stephen Fry kill a gadget?”

Yet, for every negative side of a coin, there’s an upside. Web 2.0 allows the smarter players to turn junk mail into viral marketing. We accept comments from people we like and trust far more than corporate communications. The problem for marketers is that this can mean losing control.

The key reason Service is both a threat and an opportunity today is the “2:11 Principle”. This states that customers receiving good service will share their experience with two people, whereas those receiving poor service will tell eleven. Now take a second to consider how everyday Web surfers have taken over the Net from the critics, and how they influence opinion through social networking, blogs and even review sections on e-commerce sites. Your Service team was late resolving a call? The product was delivered late? What before was a private matter between customer and the Customer Services Department is now as public as the Internet itself. And, while commercial buyers may be more reluctant to air grievances online, don’t think you’re immune if you’re operating in B2B.

But easy on the Prozac. Your Service team exceeded expectations? They always deliver on time? Hey, it works both ways. Positive enthusiasm may not match angry venom, but it still has a role to play. When, in 2007, TechRepublic asked “What bothers you when you are a customer?”, it received 132 responses; when it asked “What do you remember about good service you received?”, just 12 comments followed. But that just makes the praise (such as this heaped on Dell for the speedy replacement of a faulty hard drive) all the more valuable.

Will great post-sale service ever help turn a terrible product into a success? Unlikely, but not impossible. Will bad service ever turn a great product into a failure? You bet. So make sure you take care of your customers for the long-term – long after the excitement of opening the box is gone. And leverage the Web to make sure tomorrow’s customers know how happy today’s customers are.

With the real-time applications and connectivity it enables, Web 2.0 has taken away many excuses. And for Service to be a threat to your business is one of them.