It sounds so obvious: good customer service strengthens your brand. Or does good customer service actually start with establishing a strong brand?

 

Marketing can promise and, if necessary, reclaim; service must deliver and maintain. If self-service and automated service delivery don't work well, they become a dissatisfier And the contact center must start working on repairs. This repair work is almost always human-made: the contact center can't easily automate it. Customer service repairs not only issues caused by the company (or those resulting from an exaggerated brand promise), but also its own errors and shortcomings.

Making customer service part of your brand promise reduces repair contacts, reduces churn, and saves money on customer retention. This article offers five lessons on how customer service is the intersection of brand promise, costs, and growth.

Lesson 1: If you get your marketing right, customer service has less to fix

For some companies, customer experience is the product. Sometimes it's explicitly promoted as a brand value. Think of hospitality or other consumer products and services with a very high experiential value. For many other companies, the trend seems to be to promote their product or service, but not their service delivery, as "good" or "high-quality." Who, besides the Tax and Customs Administration, still uses (excellent) service in their payoff? "Customer King" sounds like it comes from a different era for a reason: marketing seems to want less and less to do with the service process, both literally and figuratively.

Anyone who wants to sell a product at a low price will be caught out if the service quality is also poor. Incurring costs to sell something, only to lose the battle for customers because you'd rather not incur costs to sustainably maintain revenue: it sounds illogical, but it's commonplace. Think of energy companies or parcel delivery companies that hide their phone numbers, or the use of "no-reply" emails.

Anyone who completely fails at this point can expect high churn. Anyone who wants to address the question of "cost center or value center" could split human and automated customer contact. Because repairing a poor CX due to poorly designed business processes (marketing can also be a cause of this) still has to be done by people. Or is the title Investment Center the most elegant solution to escape this apparent contradiction?

In other words, a brand promise that customer service cannot deliver is not a strategy but wishful thinking.

Lesson 2: Sometimes it's big, sometimes it's small that makes or breaks your brand

The customer journey is often defined in clear steps and touchpoints. But the customer experience can also be a matter of a thousand and one details. Like not being able to find that phone number. Or because the product you're presented with... is just not fitting for your situation. Or because you can't turn off notifications in a particular app. Or being randomly sampled three times in a row by an indifferent supermarket employee at the self-checkout.

Or, to put it more positively: the ability to track your delivery driver in real time. Or having your broken device picked up by appointment – ​​simply because "collect & repair" is part of your warranty. Or because someone speaks to you with a friendly voice instead of a disinterested one. By dealing with friction, your brand value becomes measurable. Friction can be found in both the design of your service process and the product design. The same applies to positive surprises.

In short: the details reveal whether your brand is a promise or an experience.

Lesson 3: The money you spend on good service doesn't have to be spent on bringing back customers.

It's unfortunately a cliché, but human customer contact is often necessary to fix shaky business processes. This doesn't necessarily have to be due to errors; it could also simply be a negative impact on CX or marketing policies. As mentioned, some Dutch companies choose to hide their customer service phone number. This not only forces your customer to search for the number when they really need it, but it can also come across as arrogant, because it gives the impression that your processes are always well-organized for all customers. That's rarely the case.

No matter how well-designed your happy flow is, not everyone fits into it or navigates it smoothly. It's precisely when things get difficult or complicated that you can deliver on your brand promise. It's often CX or customer service managers who determine what exactly constitutes difficult or complicated. But in practice, it's the customer who first experiences something as difficult or complicated. Even simple customer inquiries, often even if they're "automated away," can lead to "more complex conversations"—something contact center managers like to call their new core business.

A growing portion of customer service is provided through self-service and automated solutions like chatbots. The latter not only represents a different type of cost (namely IT), but also often serves as a precursor to human customer contact. The quality of self-service and automation therefore impacts customer contact personnel costs.

Conversely, you could say that customer service is inextricably linked to the product or service you sell. Good service makes that product or service even more complete and better. In the long run, good customer service contributes to value creation within an organization: this can be brand experience or revenue. The long term remains a difficult issue for marketersThey like to invest in branding and brand strategy, but is the service promise always a self-evident part of the brand promise they establish?

Think less 'overpromising', a better target group fit, better onboarding, extremely clear pricing, fewer 'dark patterns' and better information provision.

In other words: whoever spends marketing budget on winning back customers who could have retained customer service, spends money three times on the same goal: acquisition, service repair and win-back campaigns.

Lesson 4: If you want to keep your customer service going, don't cut the budget

Branding and service go hand in hand. Figures like NPS, CES, or CSAT are useful management information. Companies with high NPS or CSAT scores aren't known as places to steer clear of. Or places no one wants to work. Landal and Coolblue are apparently doing all sorts of things right. But high scores on these KPIs don't mean your call volume is at zero or that you can close the complaint handling department. If customer service is under pressure for a long period of time, it's often the result of conscious choices. You see this at companies like DIGI, The water group, Sapph, VidaXL, CBR, Bunq, parking apps, insurers, energy companies, the tax. It is almost always the case that an overloaded customer service is both the cause and the consequence of misery.

In the contact center world, repeat traffic is often dismissed as a "waste of money" (so we invest heavily in eliminating it). If repeat traffic is primarily a side effect of dysfunctional and/or inaccessible customer service, it quickly becomes exponential. Usually, this requires additional funding for additional staff – unless you simply close the lines and hope some issues will resolve themselves. Explaining how that last point aligns with your brand promise is very difficult to explain to your marketers.

In short: you cannot ignore what you are cutting back on: inaccessibility always becomes visible.

Lesson 5: Rapid growth is only possible if your service apparatus grows along with it

It's certainly not just inexperienced managers and up-and-coming boardroom teams who are suffering from poor customer service. Customer service slumps occur in both slow-growing and fast-growing companies. But there is a difference. Established companies whose contact centers are struggling should know better. After all, they've gone through a learning curve, developed processes, and have experienced talent in-house. Startups whose organizations or supply chain problems aren't compensated for by additional investments in customer service—think... Cowboy en VanMoof – should know better too. They're just a little less to blame, precisely because of the lack of that learning curve. The lesson: rapid growth + service lag = risk of brand disruption.

A startup's cuddliness isn't enough to survive in the consumer world these days. The success factors for your startup also apply to customer service: besides entrepreneurial spirit, you also need vision, talent, agility, scalability, and sufficient financial resources in that area. As you grow, you also get more interfaces—between people, in processes, and systems—and more customers who don't fit into your standard processes. Incorporating Slack is never a bad idea, but it's even a prerequisite if you want to be resilient in terms of customer satisfaction.

In short: growth ambition without service capacity is a marketing plan with a built-in pitfall.

Finally

The core of the five lessons is that service, sales, and marketing must converge into an integrated strategy: how do we want to interact with our customers at every stage? This connection sounds obvious. It isn't. Just put marketing and customer service in a box and have them explain to each other the impact of hard-to-fulfill brand promises and poor customer experiences.

 

Respond? We'd love to hear from you.????

Customer Experience, Featured, Knowledge base