Chapter List

Service provider s offerings do have an impact on the customer. In this section, a selection of five topics, customer relationship management, numbering, billing, ergonomic considerations and requirements of those with special needs, have been used to illustrate how the service provider s offerings impact on the customer.

15.1 Introduction

The stated aim of many public and private organisations is to provide world class service for their customers. Very few organisations actually achieve this goal. It is doubtful whether many of the organisations setting out in quest of this particular Holy Grail would actually recognise it when (or if ) they find it.

There would almost certainly be a very wide variety of different answers proffered as to how such a state would be defined. All would undoubtedly include some notion of commercial advantage being gained as a result of their customers perceiving that they were getting better service than could be obtained from the competition. A few would probably point to revenues growing at a far faster rate than their nearest competitors. Yet more would point to all sorts of customer satisfaction statistics gathered by painstaking and expensive research work. The most knowledgeable organisations would point to the quality of their relationships with their customers and the high degree of loyalty and marketplace advocacy of their customers.