Is Your Company Exploiting Customer Service as a Competitive Differentiator?
Just published new research from Gartner "Use Gartner's Maturity Model to Improve Customer Service."
Great customer service requires mastery of a wide range of activities, from fulfillment of customer orders while skillfully dealing with complaints, right through to full orchestration of the customer experience. The traditional customer service role is evolving. Leading organizations have broadened the purpose of the customer service role to deliver value by leading collaborative initiatives with customers as well as provide customer input to cross-functional internal processes, like sales and operations planning (S&OP). Results from Gartner's recent cross-industry customer service study indicate the value companies receive from the customer service function. Half of respondents indicated they receive either high value or competitive advantage from customer service. This outpaced other well-known supply chain capabilities, such as differentiated service, supply chain segmentation, cost-to-deliver or even cost-to-serve capabilities.
But supply chain leaders are often not aware of the skills required to develop expertise in customer service, and the function is often low on the priority list for focus and investment. There is a mismatch between the value derived from the function and the relative importance attributed to it within organizations.
Knowing where you excel and determining where you have weaknesses are important first steps in judging the adequacy of your customer service capability. Using a staged analysis, customer service leaders can obtain a deeper understanding of those shortcomings that require significant investment.
Supply chain leaders can use Gartner's Customer Service Maturity Model to define customer service excellence, assess current capabilities and prioritize actions. The model identifies the eight key capabilities needed for best-in-class customer service and how to mature these over time.
Gartner clients can access this new research on www.Gartner.com.
Use Gartner's Maturity Model to Improve Customer Service
Toolkit: Self-Assess Your Customer Service Maturity