Marketing Is The New Customer Service

by. Ron Shevlin

If I had a nickel for every time a credit union executive said his or her CU’s competitive advantage was its “superior member service” I wouldn’t be sitting here writing crappy little blog posts. I’d be flying around the world on my private jet, spending my billions of dollars.

There are a number of issues with these claims, not the least of which is the nebulous way in which “service” is defined and the lack of quantitative measurement to support the claims (“you provide better service? HOW MUCH better?”).

New research supplies another angle to the argument.  According to Zendesk:

“As many as 67% of consumers prefer helping themselves to speaking with a customer service agent. An overwhelming 91% also said they would use a company’s knowledge base if it was available and tailored to meet their needs.”

In other words, NO service is the best service.

Zendesk reports something they call the Self-Service Score, the number of users that attempt to use content made available by a company to solve an issue divided by the number of users that submit a request for an answer. The company computes the average score across industries at 4.1, which means “that for every four customers that attempted to solve their own issues via self-service, one customer chose to submit a support request.”

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