In your opinion, why do you think customer focused service is so important in any manager's plan?

of course, customers are the source of income of the business... without them, what will happen to the business? so it is very important to give the best of your ability in pleasing the customer.. well, you cannot please everyone, atleast you did your job to serve them.

Customer focus service is a series of activities designed to deliver customer satisfaction. The process of providing customer satisfaction is based on an understanding of what customers want and need. 

Effective businesses aim to anticipate and meet or exceed these needs. A high quality customer experience needs to apply from initial contact through to after-sales care, whether the customer generates a one-off transaction or regular repeat business.

Customer service, especially in the shape of a call-centre - is to customers one of the most visible and significant aspects of organizational performance.

To many organizations however customer service is one of the most challenging and neglected areas of management, including those with modern call-centres.

For customers the quality of customer service determines whether to buy, and particularly whether to remain a customer.

Think for a moment how you yourself behave as a customer. You can perhaps think of an occasion when poor customer service or an unhappy exchange with a call-centre has driven you to leave a supplier, even if the quality and value of the product or service itself is broadly satisfactory.

The significance of customer service eludes many senior executives, let alone the methods of establishing and managing customer service standards and quality. Our own experiences as customers demonstrate all the time that many large organizations fail particularly to empower customer-facing and call-centre staff, and also fail to design policies and systems to empower customer-facing staff and enable effective customer service. Often these are defensive strategies because staff are not trusted, and because competition is feared, or because simply the policy-makers and systems-designers are too far removed from customers and their customer service expectations.

Here are the top six reasons why customer focused service is so important

• IHere are the top six reasons why customer satisfaction is so important:

  It’s a leading indicator of consumer repurchase intentions and loyalty.

  It’s a point of differentiation.

  It reduces customer churn.

  It increases customer lifetime value.

  It reduces negative word of mouth

  It’s cheaper to retain customers than acquire new ones

I think customer focused service is important in any manager’s plan is because we currently have a market that is so competitive that the key for a businesses to succeed and stay a success is through attractive marketing strategies and customer retention. With that said, it is the manager’s key responsibility to communicate directives, policies, changes, etc., from people higher up in the business hierarchy and "translate" it to the employees who constantly engage and interact with customers.

Customer focused business has life in it. Span of that life depends upon the degree of focus consistently.

In simple terms, if any organization/concern wants its customer to come back to it for fulfilment of his next requirement, customer focused service in order to obtain customer satisfaction is the key.

Customer service is a series of activities designed to deliver customer satisfaction. The process of providing customer satisfaction is based on an understanding of what customer focused service want and need.

Effective businesses aim to anticipate and meet or exceed these needs. It also requires effective communication.  A high quality customer experience needs to apply from initial contact through to after-sales care, whether the customer generates a one-off transaction or regular repeat business.

Factors affecting customer satisfaction

There are many different aspects which underpin customer satisfaction in a business. These include:

• ease of use – educating customer focused service so that they know how to get the best from the service or product and designing services that are easy to use and access
• personal relationships – building a rapport with customer focused service to make them feel valued and that their needs are important, so that they develop an attachment to the service
• appropriate payment systems – enabling customer focused service to pay in ways that are convenient to them and at appropriate times, such as on satisfactory completion of service
• an effective complaints process – dealing with any problems or complaints promptly and making sure customer focused service know of the outcome
• after-sales service – checking that customer focused service have had a satisfactory experience and offering other potentially relevant services to extend the customer relationship.

The various elements of providing a satisfactory customer experience should relate to customer needs. Relevant factors for TNT customer focused service involve:

• on-time delivery – TNT aims to deliver all documents, parcels and freight to the customer’s required timescale through its door-to-door integrated air and road network
• 24/7 tracking – TNT’s sophisticated online technology makes it possible for customer focused service to track where their consignments are at any time of day, giving them reassurance
• personal attention – TNT can accommodate specific customer requirements for safe delivery of unusual or fragile items. For example, on one occasion, the company transported a life-sized fibreglass Friesian cow from Scotland to a farm in Northern Ireland!

Source: http://businesscasestudies.co.uk/

thanks invite. ........ l support answer mahamad negm

Customer focused service is very critical yet you need to take care of Gold Plating.

Gold-Plating in Project Management is the act of giving the customer more than what he originally asked for.

Consequently, there are many potential (mostly negative) consequences of it as Increasing the cost of the project,Scope Inflation,Increasing risks,Raising the expectations of the over-satisfied customer and Customer backlash.

Regards,

Hussein

Because customer is the blood which has the power to boost your business the moment you provide some in digestive or unacceptable material it becomes poison for your business.