Particularly in B2C related business segments involving a high number of customer driven transactions (e.g. Telco, airline, utilities, financial services) customer expectations have grown tremendously over the last decade and most customers are dissatisfied with the service they receive. That’s why companies with a strong brand image for excellence in service, like Apple, O2, Zappos, Virgin or Coca Cola, invest heavily in their service strategy and are thus winning the biggest market share.
Recent research from Arthur D. Little shows that 76% of companies with a successful service excellence program have reshaped their existing customer management strategy according to six dimensions. Applying its knowledge of successful service excellence programs across several industries, Arthur D. Little developed the newly defined DIN-standard for service excellence in co-operation with the European Business School (ebs), Fraunhofer Institute, and DIN. Arthur D. Little, together with leading companies in Germany has provided a solid framework for deriving optimization potentials based on detailed gap assessments.

Drivers for service excellence

Acquiring customers has a big impact on the bottom line, however losing customers or failing to create fabulous word of mouth is even more expensive (estimations suggest this can be up to 10 times as costly). A customer that experiences a poor service does not only cease to use your service or products but also deters up to 55 people in your network! So, how many customers are you losing through bad service?