Report Summary
Businesses throughout the world acknowledge that good customer service is essential to long-term success. But defining and quantifying the link between the two is difficult. Some emphasise the time it takes to deliver products and services, while others concentrate on quality, value for money or responsiveness to customer queries.
For many, however, good service is increasingly about a much broader set of values that incorporates the whole customer experience, from initial marketing to an ongoing, after-sales relationship. Measuring the impact of customer service on the bottom line is not easy, and surprisingly few companies understand the link between service excellence and financial performance.
Nevertheless, the trend towards an increasingly global marketplace and the effect of the social media revolution are giving consumers more power, so that being able to prove the return on investment for customer service spending – as well as perfecting an online engagement strategy – is likely to become increasingly essential to companies in all sectors over the next few years.
Top executives will also have to deal with leadership issues such as the position of customer satisfaction on the corporate agenda, and the need to ensure that a focus on the customer is engrained at all levels of an organisation.
In order to investigate these trends and more, The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) formed an independent steering committee of customer service experts to help define what customer service means in practice and to advise on a survey of 832 companies in Europe, North America and Asia, which was conducted at the end of 2013. The EIU also interviewed both independent experts and customer service specialists at corporations in four industry sectors: retail, natural resources, financial services, and technology, media and telecommunications (TMT). The connection between good customer service and financial performance was then analysed by comparing survey respondents’ ratings of their own service with independently verified financial results.
