Customer service can be your key differentiator

Peter Ryan, of the analyst firm Ovum, recently published a paper titled: “Leveraging Customer Experience as an Outsourcing Differentiator.”

It’s an interesting exploration into how innovation in customer service is becoming a key way for companies to differentiate the service they offer.

Of course when companies select a partner they are looking at the price and proposed service levels – usually based on experience and reference clients. Anyone making a purchasing decision wants to ensure that they are hiring a firm that has delivered before. But the observation Ryan has made rings true, based on what I am also seeing in this market.

These bullets are all quotes from the Ovum analysis:

• Customer experience and the ability to manage customer relationships across their lifecycles are increasingly important for enterprises.
• Enterprises will increasingly need analytics to understand the customer journey in 2014, and outsourcers should expand their capabilities in this area.
• Delivering strong customer experience will be one of the most important elements of any business’s value proposition over the coming 12–24 months.
• If in-house contact center managers cannot fund new analytics packages then they will be unable to gain broad and deep views of their customer bases.

This plays to the strengths we have at Teleperformance. We may be one of the largest customer experience companies in the world, offering service to customers in 62 countries, but I believe that we are also one of the most far-sighted and innovative too. Our Customer Experience Lab in Portugal is endlessly researching the future of this business.

This was recognized at the recent where Teleperformance not only won the award for the best provider of the year – demonstrating the best day after day competence at delivering customer experience – we also won the award for innovation.

The analysis by Ovum shows that our clients are thinking hard about the customer experience they offer. We are also thinking deep about what customers will want tomorrow and this innovation will be crucial to companies who are thinking beyond just what they need today.

What's your view? Leave a comment right here on LinkedIn or tweet me on @amitshankardass...

Photo by Stavos licensed under Creative Commons.