Investigating customer service excellence at Lakeside Spar

• Main Author: Meyer, Warren Carlo
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University 2009
• Subjects: Consumer satisfaction; Customer services; Customer relations management
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10948/1016

Service delivery is critical to the customer’s perception of value and is core to the success of an organisation. Excellent customer service incorporates the critical aspects of: expedient service delivery; open and honest communication; individual, personalised service; engendering customer loyalty; problem-solving; under-promising and over-delivering; meeting and exceeding expectations; efficient use of infrastructure, systems and procedures to facilitate efficient operations and, in particular, effective use of knowledge management with a focus on customer lifecycle care (Kingstone, 2004, 2005; Zarbock, 2006). Best-practice organisations now use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programmes that are customer-centric based in order to ensure excellent customer service delivery. Recently, organisations such as Tesco and Nordstrom have adopted customer-centric CRM successfully, providing concrete proof that this CRM model is sustainable and that it produces the highly lucrative win-win benefits which organisations seek (Beasty, 2005; Hallberg, 2001:19; Gratehouse, 2002; Rowe, 2002). 5 Glossary • Continuous improvement: an approach to improving performance which assumes more and smaller incremental improvement steps (Pycraft, Singh, Phihlela, Slack, Chambers, Harland, Harrison, & Johnston, 2002); • Connectivity: the ability to communicate with another system or piece of hardware or software, or with an internet site (Encarta World English Dictionary); • Customer-centric: the use of every touch-point to stimulate interest, close business, satisfy a need or demonstrate commitment to the customer relationship (Gianforte, 2005); • Customer expectations: the customer's perception of the quality of service (LeBoeuf, 1991) and value (Thompson, 2004); • Customer Experience Management: managing customer interactions to build brand equity and long-term profitability (Thompson, 2006a); • Customer lifecycle care: to ensure that every touch-point fulfils its value-potential, regardless of whether the interaction happens in marketing, sales or customer service (Gianforte, 2005); • Customer loyalty: customer’s attitudes and behaviour relating to their perception of value at every touch-point where they feel welcome, important and valued (Thompson, 2004); • Customer Relationship.