RESPONSIVENESS IS KING - And how there is more to tofu than you think

Mark Colgate is Professor at the Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria, Canada. He has consulted and taught on how to achieve higher customer satisfaction around the globe. One of his greatest achievements was taking customer satisfaction at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia from last to first in the market.

An audience summary of Mark Colgate’s IAPCO Keynote ‘Moments of power in customer service’

Mark’s insights from studying various companies are that most organisations actually have the service talent and ideas but are lacking tools, processes, rituals, KPIs and incentives required for service to thrive. This usually goes back to processes being optimised for management rather than service leadership.

The three ‘R’s Great customer service can be defined by three Rs: reliability, responsiveness and relationship. It is important to understand the right order in which customers view good service. Reliability is the basis for customer satisfaction. Being able to perform as promised, accurately and on time is the core need of any client. This is followed by responsiveness. You need to be able to reduce the client’s effort in getting information and answers. Relationship building is the final R: giving caring and personalised attention. Studies show that the better the focus on the 3 Rs, with reliability as the base R, the higher the rating for customer service. The studies further show that if customer service is rated at nine or 10/10 the recommendation rate for the company is around 90%, while it drops to only 68% at a rating of 8/10. Nothing short of excellence creates loyalty.

And now the tofu It is important to adopt a framework with processes, KPIs and incentives around these three Rs. The habit of using the three Rs as a customer experience framework enables a company to start inventing on the customer’s behalf. In that sense service talent needs to adopt those three Rs into their daily habits and then TOFU – Take Ownership and Follow Up.