The ROI Of Customer Service

Chief Executive Officer at Nucleus Research, the leading provider of ROI-focused technology research and advisory services.

I recently had a terrible experience with a staff member at an Apple Store. My past experiences with this company had been great, but when I looked at the reviews for this particular store, I found I was not alone. There were enough single-star reviews on Google to not be an isolated incident. I added my own colorful comments to Google’s collection, but that got me thinking about the ROI of customer service.

How do you recognize a bad front-line employee, and can technology fix this customer service problem before it has an impact on future sales?

During the past 20 years, one of our primary market research areas at my company has been measuring the ROI of customer relationship management (CRM) software. As far back as 2014, we found CRM returns $8.71 for every dollar spent. As CRM matured over the years, new capabilities for customer support and field service were obvious expansions to CRM capabilities. We found Powerhome Solar, for instance, achieved an ROI over 1000% by deploying a field service solution to streamline its operations. The great returns from the customer support branch of CRM came from customer self-service, agent support and greater efficiencies in managing field support activities — essentially, cutting costs.

But that all falls down when the only human contact the customer has with the company turns out to deliver a bad experience. 

One need only look at the perpetual smile on Jeff Bezos’s face to know that the pandemic has changed the nature of shopping. We’re more likely to order online, making contact with sales staff during in-store pickup or an actual visit an increasingly rare occurrence. Each interaction between a staff member and a customer becomes much more valuable since it sets the tone not just for that sale but also other sales by the customer online.

The typical method for gathering customer service feedback is the after-contact survey. We all get them, and we all know customer service agents are rated on our responses. That’s fine for no-contact interactions as call center agents are well trained in interacting with a customer through this medium. In-person interactions are different. The idea of service is more subtle, but has a long-lasting impact.

To be successful here, organizations need to blend customer satisfaction feedback with human capital management, and it may not be as easy as trying to identify a single bad employee. It may be a mix of good employees that, when scheduled together, creates a less-than-satisfactory environment. 

There are companies such as Reflexis, Blue Yonder and Workforce Software that focus on the retail side of human capital management by using AI techniques to analyze employee mix against sales performance, identify top performers and even suggest where in the store the employee should stand. It’s a type of solution that I expect will grow in importance as retail outlets look to maximize their increasingly expensive human investment.

Even before hiring, there are recruiting tools such as TalentSoft, iCIMS, ClearCompany, Greenhouse and Zoho Recruit that can properly screen candidates for both fit and temperament, increasing the likelihood of a successful hire. Unfortunately, once hired, reporting and analytics can only go so far. For the foreseeable future, recurring staff training combined with a watchful manager — not technology — will remain the final step in ensuring the front-line employee delivers a positive customer experience.

In the case of the Apple store, I simply passed. It was a spur-of-the-moment purchase and, to me, wasn’t worth the effort to continue to interact with that particular employee. There are plenty of other Apple locations in the area and I easily found them using the Google map application on my new Samsung phone.

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