Customer service
What Is Customer Service? These are actions or reactions, which ensure customer satisfaction, happiness or pleasure.
“It costs five times more to gain a new customer than it does to keep an existing one”
- Attracting and maintaining customers entails the following:
- Providing quality, service and value.
- Maintaining high customer satisfaction.
- Offering good customer service.
- Maintaining good customer care.
Customer service includes all activities involved in making it easy for customers to:
- Reach the right parties within the company
- Receive quick and satisfactory service, answer and resolution of problems.
- Types of Services
- Giving help, advice and training on the required product or service.
- Taking customer orders and ensuring timely deliveries.
- Handling customer requests promptly.
- Attending to customer queries or complaints competently.
- Providing product information, prices and specifications including even benefits of products already in use.
- Handling telephone sales services.
- Handling new accounts as requested
- Developing healthy client relationship – knowledge of their likes and dislikes, their strengths and weaknesses.
- Introducing new confidence builders; re-affirming old ones.
- Creating and maintaining good will with customers.
- Dissatisfied when performance of a product/service falls short of expectation.
- Satisfied when performance matches expectations.
- Highly satisfied, pleased or delighted when performance exceeds expectations.
- This creates affinity with the brand and high customer loyalty.
Generic strategies - These are classified based on the dimensions of strategic scope and strategic strength.
- Strategic scope refers to the level of market penetration while
- Strategic strength refers to the firm’s sustainable competitive advantage.
- Cost leadership
- Product differentiation
- Market segmentation
Firms are classified based on their market share or dominance of an industry. Typically, there are three types of market dominance strategies:
- Leader
- Challenger
- Follower
This deals with the firm's rate of the new product development and business model innovation. It asks whether the company is on the cutting edge of technology and business innovation. There are three types:
– Pioneers
– Close followers
– Late followers
This scheme draws parallels between marketing strategies and military strategies.
Other competitive strategic options include;
- Horizontal integration
- Vertical integration
- Diversification
- Intensification
