Customer Service Strategy Assessment for Small Business Consulting

Introduction

This paper analyzes the customer service strategies of the Business Resource Management Group. The basis of this analysis is an interpretation and discussion of a customer service survey completed in conjunction with the company. The Business Resource Management Group is a consultancy that serves small businesses in the areas of IT development, human resources, marketing, and organizational development, with a specific focus on emerging small businesses in the introductory and growth stages of development — typically those with 50 employees or fewer.

As Business Resource Management Group is by nature a services-based company, the need to ensure a consistently high level of performance for clients must be translated into a long-term strategic advantage. Customer service must be the foundation of all areas of this consultancy if it is to achieve its full potential and continually attract and serve new clients.

Customer Service Implications Based on Survey Results

In assessing the commitment to and level of customer service at Business Resource Management Group, ten questions were created to measure the consultancy's current level of customer centricity and its ability to take the core values of service and base strategies and initiatives on them. These ten questions also focus on the level of inter-organizational knowledge sharing and the commitment to share customer-specific information throughout the consultancy.

This is a critical value for any company when it comes to customer service. In a consultancy — especially a smaller one like Business Resource Management Group — everyone needs good visibility into all customer-related information in order to serve clients effectively. The intent of this section is to review each survey response and discuss the results in terms of implementing customer service strategies throughout the organization. Each question was scored on a five-point Likert scale with the following values:

Survey Question Analysis: Objectives, Monitoring, and Communication

1 = Strongly Disagree   2 = Disagree   3 = Neutral   4 = Agree   5 = Strongly Agree

Each question is presented below, followed by an analysis of what the responses indicate about Business Resource Management Group from a customer service standpoint.

With a score of 4 — indicating that managers agree their consultancy is driven primarily by the need to deliver customer satisfaction — this question highlights the fact that the unmet and at times urgent needs of customers help define future strategies, offerings, and even the completion of specific jobs and tasks. The commitment to customer satisfaction must be backed up with strategies for measuring how satisfied customers actually are, which approaches work best for increasing satisfaction, and when a customer typically transitions from a transactional relationship with Business Resource Management Group to becoming a loyal client who turns to the consultancy for the majority of their work.

For the consultancy to accomplish this, it must measure customer churn — specifically examining how often customers defect and why. Only by understanding churn will the consultancy be able to translate its high-level commitment to customer satisfaction into actionable plans, strategies, and programs. For customer satisfaction to be the cornerstone of any objective at Business Resource Management Group, it must first be measured; second, the reciprocal question of why customers leave must also be understood.

With a score of 2, the consultancy's management is indicating that while objectives are largely driven by concern for customer satisfaction, the company does not actively monitor or evaluate its level of commitment and orientation toward serving customer needs. This is ironic: on one hand, objectives are set with customer satisfaction in mind, yet there is no active monitoring of how well the company is tracking to that ideal.

What is clearly needed is a multi-step program that brings the commitment to — and orientation toward — serving customer needs to the forefront of how the consultancy evaluates major strategies, process creation, and redefinition of major functional areas and programs. Each new strategy or initiative must then be evaluated against benchmarks measuring its commitment to fulfilling major unmet customer needs. Only after this two-step process will the consultancy be able to demonstrate that it has genuinely increased its monitoring of customer commitment and built a culture that stresses orientation toward customer needs.

Survey Question Analysis: Competitive Advantage, Measurement, and Focus

With a rating of 1, the consultancy's managers strongly disagree with this statement. While this is fairly common even in the most customer-centric organizations, it is a significant problem. The ability to share both exceptionally good and bad news about customers is one of the more difficult processes for companies to put in place. A rating of 1 makes clear that no meaningful information regarding customer successes or failures is making its way through the organization.

This points to a broader systemic problem: the lack of knowledge transfer is limiting the company's ability to become a learning organization. This is a critical shortcoming for any consultancy, because it is essential that, over time and in the service of customers, the company learns which strategies, processes, and programs deliver best practices to clients. Without a more fluid and effective approach to sharing both positive and negative customer stories, the consultancy will drastically slow its ability to innovate.

With a rating of 5 — the only question to receive the highest ranking possible — senior management clearly believes that the consultancy's acuity and insight into customers' needs is superior and constitutes a source of competitive advantage. In providing services to clients, the consultancy must by necessity understand, in detail, each client's objectives and unmet needs; these are the cornerstones of any successful client engagement and the essence of exceeding expectations. However, given the low scores on other questions, it appears that senior management may be conflating in-depth project knowledge for individual customers with a broader understanding of the market's unmet needs.

Paradoxically, many services-based companies claim that their competitive advantage stems from understanding customers' needs, yet have no idea what levels of satisfaction their customers are experiencing — or, more importantly, what actual benefits clients are accruing from the initiatives, plans, programs, and strategies put in place at the consultancy's recommendation. Despite such claims, these firms have no way of knowing whether those initiatives are making an impact. This issue of demonstrable impact is a major one and is ultimately the true test of the value a consultancy delivers to its clients. To claim competitive advantage based on knowledge of customers' needs while failing to measure outcomes is to deny the consultancy the evidence it needs to prove the impact it makes.

With a score of 2, this result signals that despite senior management's belief — expressed in Question 1 — that customer centricity is the basis of the consultancy's objectives, there is no meaningful tie-back to actually measuring satisfaction. This disconnect is common in services-based companies, where it is often assumed that if a customer pays, they are generally satisfied with what was delivered. Yet as noted in the analysis of Question 4, services companies frequently claim that their understanding of customers' needs leads to competitive advantage while never actually measuring the impact of their strategies on specific customers' satisfaction levels.

For Business Resource Management Group to transform what it perceives as a competitive advantage into an actual one, it must become focused and deliberate about measuring customer satisfaction. First, an unbiased methodology must be defined — one that truly reflects customers' opinions regarding both the quality of the consultancy's work and its impact on their business strategies. Second, the results must be made visible throughout the entire organization. Charts and graphs showing customer satisfaction scores should be prominently displayed throughout the company, and satisfaction measures must begin permeating discussions and strategy sessions. To close the gap between listening and acting, managers must commit to creating ongoing Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs to capture key insights and learn from them.

Conclusion

The paradoxes that pervade Business Resource Management Group illustrate an organization that wants to see itself as driven by customer satisfaction yet lacks either the discipline or the passion to define the processes, procedures, and programs needed to actually capture customer satisfaction data in the first place. The disconnect is disconcerting, and if left unaddressed, the gap will widen until customers' actual perceptions force management's beliefs into alignment with reality. The bottom line is that customers' perceptions are reality. Senior managers must move beyond simply claiming a competitive advantage rooted in customer knowledge and commit to passionately pursuing the systematic measurement of customer satisfaction — while building a high level of accountability into every person's role at Business Resource Management Group to reflect a genuine, unwavering commitment to the highest levels of customer service possible.