At your service in the business jungle

By Helen Vause

Customers are more than twice as likely to remember bad experiences as good ones.

An unhappy customer can be expected to bad-mouth your business to at least 15 other people, where satisfied ones will probably say positive things to six others.

Undervaluing the importance of good service can undermine apparently strong marketing strategies.

Putting service high on the priority list is the mission of Catherine DeVrye, whose research on the relationship between service and commercial good health has motivated many companies to take a closer look at how they handle what emerges from the dreaded "complaints department."

Sydney-based DeVrye is the author of The Customer Service Zoo, a followup to her Good Service is Good Business, which was a top-selling business title in Australia in 1996. The new book takes a novel approach - its advice is based on observations of zoo animals.

A former Australian Executive Woman of the Year, DeVrye is in New Zealand to talk service with businesses and local government.

It is a timely message with the impending millennium celebrations and America's Cup influx which will expose our service standards - warts and all - as never before.

Those events are a big opportunity, she says, to combine best world practices with the internationally perceived qualities of Kiwi warmth and friendliness. The flip-side, she warns, is that when we mess up, the bad impressions can carry a long way.

While we place far more importance on service than in the days when we sniffed stubbornly about subservience, customer expectations globally have risen sharply, too. Research shows that 67 per cent of Australian consumers have significantly higher expectations now than five years ago.

Great customer service can yield tangible financial benefits, says DeVrye. A United States survey of 3000 companies showed that perceived good service providers could charge an average of 9 to 10 per cent more for the same product or service than poor ones and have happier customers, could grow twice as fast as competitors improve market share an average 6 per cent a year.

Conventional marketing wisdom tells us it costs five times more to obtain a new customer than to retain an existing one, and that a customer service issue well handled is likely to lead to a more brand-loyal customer or someone who will feel good about a business-to-business relationship.

Knowing these is one thing, having the commitment to dust off the customer service strategy and make it a priority is often the sticking point, says DeVrye.

"Service has to come out of the complaints department and be driven through the attitude of management. Not all service improvements are based on better handling of customer relationships - the traditional concept of customer service.

"Proactive service programmes have special application in the supply chain leading to new revenue sources and strong supplier and client relationships. Long-term success depends not on closing a sale but on opening a relationship. It takes months to find a new customer but only seconds to lose one.

"Obviously, many people doing business in a rush may not be looking for the added value from personal interaction. Service to those people is the invisible streamlining of your operation that shows you understand how precious time is to your customers and clients.

"Besides, all those faceless clients, in a global and internet-invaded marketplace, could easily be swiped by competition elsewhere in the world. The real competition is external: if you don't look after your customers someone else will."

But it's horses, for courses, says DeVrye - high tech aside, service begins with attitude.

She cites a bank in San Francisco where retired people were a significant chunk of the clientele. The bank became aware that high automation left young tellers grappling with many disgruntled elderly customers.

In an innovative experiment, the bank put tellers into the customer's shoes: their glasses were smeared with vaseline to impair vision, ears plugged with cotton wool to dim hearing, and fingers bound with tape to give the clumsiness of arthritic fingers.

As a result, the tellers called for thicker pencils, comfortable seats and a more elder-friendly banking environment. That bank, says DeVrye, rapidly increased its share among the well-heeled elderly.

At the snappy service end of the scale, she cites the success of e-ticketing in airline travel.

"Everyone likes it because it saves time and makes travel easier."

Her message is simple: know your customers and deliver what they want with the best possible service. Listening to feedback from staff at the bottom of the ladder can also lead to internal economies and changing things that customers never realised bugged them.

She tells of an American airline that saved $US1.5 million a year by listening to the garbage boy when it came to figuring what to do about the big volume of inflight food being discarded.

"It's the lettuce," he told them. "Everyone leaves a pile of it on their plate." Lettuce was dropped from the menu.

DeVrye's The Customer Service Zoo is based on a fictitious, harassed executive charged with writing a customer service strategy. Seeking inspiration he visits the zoo and observes animal interactions. His observations lead him to deceptively simple solutions for everyday situations.

The book is a soft-sell, feelgood work among business publications. The key message is the basic, Australianised maxim: the WOMBAT principle - Word of Mouth Best Advertising Technique.

* The Customer Service Zoo, by Catherine DeVrye. Allen & Unwin.