Improving Customer Satisfaction and Retention through Differentiated Service Levels
Tailor service offerings to reflect customer value. Employ differentiated service levels and increase retention among your most valuable clients. World-class corporations realize that over 80% of their profits are derived from 20% of their customers. To improve customer retention of their top customers, many firms tailor their service offerings to reflect the value of their customer. This study, developed from operational research examining more than 40 companies and 11 interviews with key executives, details the methods world-class companies use.
Customer Service > Customer Service Measurement d
Industries Profiled:
Financial Services; High Tech; Manufacturing; Banking
Companies Profiled:
AT&T UCS; Citigroup; IBM; Wells Fargo
Study Snapshot
World-class corporations realize that over 80% of their profit is derived from 20% of their customers. To improve customer retention of their top customers, many firms tailor their service offerings to reflect the potential value of their customer. This tailoring of services is often called "Differentiated Service Levels," or DSL.
This Best Practices Benchmarking® Report, developed from operational research examining more than 40 companies and 11 executive interviews details the methods, including DSL, that world-class companies use to ensure the satisfaction of their high-value customers.
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Key Findings
The information in this report is divided into three chapters which include:
Chapter I: Understand Customer Segment Needs
- Employ multiple "listening posts" to capture customer current and emerging needs.
- Develop a structured approach to prioritize customer requirements.
- Utilize multi-level segmentation to focus sales and marketing resources.
- Employ self-selecting, individually correcting customer segmentation for effective target marketing.
- Refine segmentation techniques to better target customers for additional selling opportunities.
Chapter II: Design Service to Address Customer Needs and Value
- Employ a structured process for designing new service offerings.
- Develop fast response systems for launching new product bundles that leverage existing core service capabilities.
- Design service offerings to meet unique needs of diverse customer segments.
- Employ an "offer" to help quantify the response effectiveness of all marketing communications.
- Partner with leading companies outside the industry to leverage their capabilities in new customer acquisition.
Chapter III: Develop Customer Retention Strategies
- Use a performance measurement systems to ensure a high service standard.
- Identify and prioritize failure points to focus efforts on improving service delivery.
- Develop recovery capabilities by creating specialized dispute gates and recovery units.
- Regularly conduct management reviews to ensure performance levels and to take rapid corrective actions when problems occur.
- Cross-sell products and services to satisfy customer needs and increase retention by setting a higher "switching" cost.
- Develop a systematic approach to identifying early warnings that signal a system problem resulting in customer defection.
- Set research/response standards to ensure timely complaint resolution.
- Analyze customer service complaints to understand the root causes for service problems.
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