Are you underselling your service strengths?

If you’re burying your service capabilities in the hackneyed phrase “good customer service”, perhaps it’s time to craft and sell your real value proposition.

“Why do your customers buy from you versus the competition?”

If I had a dollar for every time the answer to this question has been “good customer service”, I’d be richer. (The other answer is commonly relationships, but I’ve debunked that over here.)

The fact is that ‘good customer service’ doesn’t mean a helluva lot. It’s a ticket to play and it sounds just like something everyone gives. (Because who actually says they’ve got bad customer service?)

However, that doesn’t mean that customer service can’t be a differentiating proposition.

Over the last 18 months or so, we’ve been consulting to a large industrial company, re-positioning and differentiating their products. In the course of this though, we realized that while product performance and quality is important to the customer, what’s actually more important is the customer service. And in their industry, customer service means a series of very specific things. 

For example, the supply chain has a number of important steps: can I get my order delivered on the first truck? (7am.) Can you run your plant for 24 hours a day so I can have deliveries during the night if I want to? How easily can I schedule the spacing of deliveries, like a truck every 20 or 30 minutes? How good are you at keeping to those scheduled times? (OTD – on time delivery.) The list goes on 

Our audit told us that our client has truly world-leading logistics. They have a software platform that dynamically allocates orders and trucks with a high OTD performance rate. They have on-line apps for ordering and truck arrival visibility. They have a customer service centre that others try and copy.

At the moment, they bury all of this in the phrase ‘good customer service’. But if they do as we’ve recommended, and express that capability as a promise to the customer, as well as produce customer performance scorecards to track how they’re going, they can really start to differentiate themselves on the basis of service.

We found a similar situation in a large agri-chem company. Now, that’s a commodity-oriented business! They had a strapline that ostensibly focused on ‘service’ – but that’s pretty much all it was; a slogan.

We worked with them to identify the key service elements that mattered to their customers, and we double-checked that with customers in the field. We then mapped how they performed vs their competitors. 

What we found was that on some key service elements, it would be very difficult for our client to out-perform their competitors; but what they could focus on was parity. However, there were a couple of related service elements where they could out-perform, if they just tweaked what they were doing a little.

For the first time, the business has an agreed understanding of exactly how their customers want them to perform; service isn’t just this motherhood statement. It’s something specific and measurable. (More on that here.)

However, it also now has a differentiating proposition that’s much more than a slogan; it’s a story about how this company delivers value to their target customers. And it gives sales a way to avoid selling on price so they can sell that value. 

Is your business underselling its service strengths? Are you burying your service capabilities in the hackneyed phrase “good customer service”? If you are, perhaps it’s time to craft and sell your real value proposition. To find out more about our first step start with a conversation with Dr Abbie Widin (Ph: 0407 210 693).