Customer service - wherefore art thou

Customer centricity, customer experience, client satisfaction, customer loyalty et al have increasingly become the new buzz words for corporations. But how many actually deliver on this "promise"?

A recent experience with my broadband vendor promoted me to think this through. I first tried an on line chat, followed by an on-line communication, then a call with customer service and finally an email to the appellate authority/nodal officer/ombudsman . I was appalled by the outcome. Finally I escalated to a senior contact on linked in (though normally I never use this forum for personal help but was at wits end). The gentlemen responded rapidly, I got 3 calls within 5 minutes and the issue got resolved.

So here were my take-aways:

1. SOP's are the death of customer service. The lady I spoke to told me their "process" did not allow her to register a complaint till she'd done her trouble shooting (which was going nowhere) and she refused to escalate to her supervisor. If she'd been given some discretion, we could have moved forward. This reminded me of how the Ritz Carlton had empowered their bell boys to on the spot offer upto a $100 to a dissatisfied customer.
2. If companies allocated a small portion of what they spend on customer acquisition (cool web sites, advertising, direct mail etc) to customer retention they'd get a far greater ROI. We all know acquiring a new customer is far more expensive than retaining one. I am convinced people will happily pay a little more for great customer service.
3. The training imparted is completely inadequate, especially given the churn. I recall when I was MD of 3M, I used to anonymously call the help line to see what our customers went through. This was not with the intention of being critical of the customer service team but identifying opportunities for improvement. Similarly as Chairman of a bank I'd walk into branches as a regular customer to first hand gauge the experience our clients face. CEO's should try this. It will be an eye-opener.
4. We have awards for all kinds of things but how often does one hear of "best customer service" being felicitated. The periodic customer satisfaction surveys companies do are very rarely taken seriously and acted upon. This should be a CEO level responsibility.

Brand loyalty is declining especially amongst millennials and customer service is increasingly going to become the only differentiator for the many "me-too's" we see.

The irony is every executive claims to recognise the importance of this to their business but in most cases it still sucks.

Need a wake up call.