Measuring Customer Service

Why did Adobe move into customer experience management?

Ben Watson:  That is actually a great question Brent. I think the technologies that you bring up, I would category as the technologies of which I would make something for a user. The way that we are really thinking about Adobe’s position going forward, especially in the enterprise, is we really provide three areas of support, expertise and technology to help our customers:  So ultimately, we are becoming the make, manage and measure brand, as I think about it, in the enterprise. While we are probably still best known for 'make', in terms of Photoshop, Illustrator - our design tools - Acrobat for making documents, Flash for making multimedia presentations on the web or for delivering and making applications, and delivering an actual interactive application. I would argue that in the web space we are pretty well known from a measuring perspective as well. The acquisition of Omniture a few years has grown into the Adobe Online Marketing Suite , and we have a strong set of tools there around, not just measurement of web activity, but now measurement of social activity analytics that are relative to the communities you might be forming at an enterprise, or also your work that you do with third party communities, like the major social networks, etc. Here in the middle are these set of technologies that I am focused on which are ultimately the management. By management I mean web content management, business process management and rolling all of this up under the umbrella of customer experience management. We’ve made this change at Adobe on the back of the work we were doing with our enterprise customers, really. It’s not so much that we choose or selected to go after this, but at a certain point obviously we did. It was more that if we looked realistically across all the work that we were doing with our partner ecosystem, the kind of stuff that we were doing with our top customers in financial services and in government, we were ultimately the technology that was being used at the first mile, or what people would have traditionally called the last mile, in terms of getting an application or a set of documents, an interaction, or message, policy, contract, agreement out to another customer or business partner. So really, this aggregates and brings together a lot of work that we were already doing in the enterprise.

Delivering and measuring customer service: This isn't rocket ...

When accomplished, the sales professional usually has an emotional investment in the success of the relationship. Therefore, sales people care deeply about customer service. If this is true, those that support the sales person should also care about the customer experience. I have been reading a lot lately about methods for driving the customer experience.

I have recommended reading about Zane’s bike store in the past as a primer on this topic. I just finished another book on the subject that gives a fantastic framework for customer service. This is the type of book that a sales leader can read to better understand the life cycle of a customer and how they can lead the organization to continue building loyalty after the sale.

Richard Hanks summarizes his experience in Delivering and Measuring Customer Service using two main principles:

The first principle states that the major drivers of financial success can be traced back to loyal customers who recommend your business over and over, and loyal employees who become increasingly more productive, providing better service and contributing more to the company’s bottom line over time. The second principle states that a company that continuously measures their customers’ experiences will improve exponentially. He also points out your customers’ needs and wants change continually—you must measure their experiences in real time, be flexible and try to anticipate their needs.

Richard Hanks recommends we measure customer perceptions of service quality on the five dimensions of reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and tangibles such as atmosphere and appearance.

In Part II – Cultural Catalysts of Service, the author echoes a platinum rule of customer service: ‘We do for our customers as they would have done for them.’ I agree strongly with this rule as it pertains to the selling experience the customer expects.

He states in Part III – Gathering Customer Feedback, that you can engage the customer in providing feedback in all five dimensions through various kinds of surveys (automated phone, Web and mobile-device surveys). These surveys will make customer feedback convenient, anonymous, unbiased, immediate and actionable and give you a complete picture of your performance.

I was also inspired by Part IV – Analyzing the Results of Customer Feedback. One of the most important keys to continuous improvement in customer service is to institutionalize customer feedback and measurement and make it a “Brand Standard” of your company.