We interviewed executives at 13 companies that are widely viewed as existing or emerging leaders in customer service in order to better understand their views on how exemplary customer service can be achieved and used to create a sustainable competitive advantage. Our research reflects the experiences of a number of senior executives at top performing companies in a variety of industries, including financial services, telecommunications, hospitality, airlines, retail, insurance, technology and energy, as well as our collective experience working with large organizations and their frontlines - the employees who serve customers every day.

Our research findings and conceptual conclusions are presented in this white paper, available as a PDF file at the bottom of this page.

Excerpt:

What we have discovered is that much of the accepted wisdom about customer service is incomplete and can actually undermine delivery of great service. For example, many companies make the following customer service mistakes:

• Adopting a customer-comes-first ethos at the expense of employees
• Providing scripted responses for customer interactions
• Relegating customer service to a cost-center status

Despite the widespread acceptance of these and similar practices across many industries, our evidence shows that these practices do not consistently deliver a sustained, high level of service to customers.

Don't Let Customer Service Stop at the Frontline

Nearly all of the executives we interviewed identified customer service as a strategic source of differentiation and recognized the importance that their companies' frontlines play in achieving it. But unlike many of their industry peers, they also realized that customer service does not - should not - stop at the frontline.

Our research found that while many companies have recognized the need for an empathetic frontline - one that can sense and respond to a customer's issues - only companies that embrace, in their values and practices, an ethos of institutional-wide empathy are able to realize the highest levels of long-term benefits from customer service.

The Empathy Engine Alternative

To capture this broader conception of customer service, we introduce the concept of an empathy engine. In a company acting as an empathy engine, senior leaders, managers and frontline employees work together to collectively stand in their customers' shoes in order to better understand and resolve customer needs.

Specifically, empathy engine companies consistently strive to:

• Understand and resolve customers' problems at minimum cost to customers
• Create a company-wide culture of empathy
• Empathize with an give decision-making power to their frontline employees, so they can focus on generating excellent customer service
• Sustain a service ethos through the company through storytelling
• View the frontline as a hotbed for innovative customer service
• View customer service as a profit-generating activity and important contributor to shareholder value, rather than "just a cost center"

By implementing a company-wide, holistic approach to customer service, many of the companies we spoke with have become renowned for great customer service. They have locked in long-term customer relationships that set them apart from their competitors, and which will be difficult for their competitors to disrupt. Such relationships have quantifiable long-term benefits for the companies that possess them.

To read "The Empathy Engine," click on the link below.