Barriers to Customer Touch Excellence

In Customer Touch Strategies, the key to success is to remove the barrier that stop your company from becoming truly customer-centric. In the book, Keeping Your Customers for Life, authors Joan Cannie and Donald Caplin outline 12 barriers you will encounter when trying to provide higher levels of service to your customers.

1. Your company policies are designed for the convenience and control of your business rather than serving the needs of your customers – your paradigm.
2. The work you do is specialized among your team. As a result, customers may deal with multiple people in your company for the services or products your provide, to get answers, to solve problems, etc. This encourages “pass the buck” or “blame someone else” practices within the company.
3. If various elements of the service process or building of a product are uncoordinated, no ownership of the customer work product develops. One person working on a customer may have little influence on another park of the work.
4. Policy makers are too far removed from the customers to understand how their policies annoy customers.
5. Service policies are arbitrarily applied. Customers are treated differently by one team member than another.
6. Cost control is stressed by management so front-line team members are more focused on short-term costs of serving a customer rather than on the lifetime value of that customer.
7. Unless team members are empowered and rewarded for delivering excellence in customer service, why should they bother. They do their jobs to a point and no further because they are not encouraged to.
8. Too often, management thinks they know what is best for the customer and don’t ask or listen to customers. This often leads to an expectation gap between the customer and the company.
9. “Customer Service” is associated with complaint handling. Since most people are naturally adverse to negative experiences, most people avoid dealing with customer issues whenever possible. Most people are not proactive in identifying issues. They prefer to react when they must. And because of this, many companies miss the opportunity to turn a negative into a positive experience for the customer — which could have resulted in increased levels of trust and loyalty.
10. The team members with front-line customer contact are powerless to solve problems. They must get authority or direction from superiors. Since lower employees are reluctant to address negative issues with people that influence their promotions and salaries, they are discouraged to act quickly to go beyond what their job requires of them.
11. In lieu of really solving the issues and why they developed in the first place, management simply writes off the work, refunds the money, or provides future work at a discount or free. This is a band-aid not a solution. It doesn’t address the emotional side of the complaint.
12. Customers expectations are set too high in the sale process and are poorly communicated to the team members performing the work.

Take you marketing efforts to the Next Level!
Reaching beyond the expected with persuasive marketing solutions that target the right audience at the right time. Integrated marketing solutions that explain in a compelling way what a product or service does, the value it brings, and why a reader should be interested in learning more.

Email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or give us a call at (630) 665-4440.