Don Peppers: The critical misconception undermining customer service

 

If recent reports are to be believed, there’s a crisis in customer service. A Convergys study earlier this year revealed that four out of five consumers believe that customer service standards have deteriorated over the last year, with many communicating their negative brand experiences to friends and family.

 

So what’s the problem? Are businesses simply not investing enough resources into their customer service? Are they struggling to nurture a customer-centric culture? Perhaps it’s simply because the modern customer is more demanding than ever?

 

Acclaimed speaker, author and founding partner of the Peppers & Rogers group, Don Peppers, has his own thoughts about the deficiencies. And he believes that there is a fundamental problem that is undermining not only service, but the entire business strategy of many modern companies. Quite simply, organisations have long been living under the misconception that company value is created by offering differentiated products and services.

 

"Customers are far more centrally connected to the issue of value creation for companies than products are," he explains. "You can have all the patents and warehouses full of desirable products that you want, but the only way that you can actually create value is with a customer. Because if you don’t have a customer, it doesn’t matter how many products you have, you don’t have a business.

 

"In the history of business we have always organised our businesses by production, so we have people who manage factories and warehouses and retail outlets and so forth, and they think in terms of the things that they are managing, which are the processes designed to produce products. But in a sense, all the attention that has been paid to product differentiation has diverted companies’ attention from what is really even more central to their business - and that is the question of customers.”