One of the basic principles of Customer Centricity is service. Why? Service is taking action to care for another person. More importantly, it is taking action to create value for another person (Ron Kaufman). It is how one adds value to others and, in the process, gains more from oneself. In most cases (although not on purpose), people feel good about providing a service to others, since doing so naturally involves a positive feeling within themselves. In essence, service is a spirit of altruism. It’s not just a procedure to follow, but a mindset of purposeful engagement and proactive communication that leads to productive behavior.

Let’s define Customer Service.

Wikipedia defines customer service as the act of serving the needs of customers by providing and delivering professional, helpful, high-quality service and assistance before, during, and after their requirements are met. One of my favorite customer service (CX) gurus, Michael Falcon, defines it as “one action within a complete customer experience, and to achieve a great experience, every touch point from start to finish must be be exceptional.” Note that this definition of Customer Service gives rise to its particular ingredient, “touch point,” which means every point of contact with a customer (face-to-face, phone calls, emails, ticket logs, etc.) .

For its part, Turban (2002) defines Customer Service as “a series of activities designed to increase the level of customer satisfaction, that is, the feeling that a product or service has met customer expectations”.

Apparently in these concepts given by the experts, common factors emerge in Customer Service: action/delivery, attention and satisfaction of customer needs. In addition, there is frequent use of superlatives such as exceptional, excellent, highest quality, and the like.

In a few words, Customer Service is any action at all points of contact with the customer, where we deliver our knowledge and skills to customers to meet their needs and expectations in an excellent way. It is the cornerstone of a customer experience (CX) strategy. It’s a commendable balance of service delivery (including best practices and agent experience) and satisfying customers at a cost. It is about how an organization delivers its products or services in the most humanly satisfying way, as pleasant as possible.

What kind of service is needed then? Answer: We need superior service to be provided at any point of contact, because “good is not good enough anymore.” To quote Ron Kaufman once again, “What was good enough yesterday isn’t good enough today. What’s good enough today won’t be good enough tomorrow.” This is so due to the rapidly changing business world. It is very important to keep climbing the service level ladder to keep up with the competitive environment. Be close to your customers and really anticipate their needs, as even their wants and needs change quickly too. “The business world is always unpredictable,” as they say. This gives us more reasons to get even closer and get to know our customers even better.

With ever-increasing standards, how can we provide excellent or superior service? As mentioned, surely there must be a balance of excellent performance between the product (technical or otherwise) and the experience (relationship aspect of interactions with our customers). In addition to this, we must make our customers a priority. A critical component of Customer Centricity is a customer-centric mindset (or for some people, “customer first mindset”). Focus on them as people and not as a problem to create a satisfying human experience. Superior/excellent customer service can not only result in Customer Satisfaction, but more so, Customer Loyalty, the ultimate reward of Customer Focus. Without a doubt, top-notch service creates loyalty and a returning customer, which is our goal in business.