And The Best Company for Service Is…

This is a guest post by Pete Slease of the Customer Contact Council, our sister program for call center and customer service functions. We’ve modified it a bit for a sales audience. Visit the original here!

This year, CCC asked nearly 1,000 customers the question, “What is the best company for customer service?” and the most popular response was:

Can’tthinkofone

If you’re having trouble reading that response, it’s “Can’t think of one”.

CCC decided to take the verbatim responses from a recent customer survey and enter them into a program to create a word cloud. If you’ve never seen a word cloud before, it’s a pretty cool program that shows the frequency of the use of words by the size of the font of those words. So, the more frequently a word or words are used, the bigger the font is in the word cloud. And when CCC entered the responses into the word cloud program, the largest response was “Can’t think of one”. Not Amazon or Zappos or Nordstrom. It was, “You know, I can’t think of one”.

Think about that for a minute…when we asked nearly 1,000 customers to tell us who is the best company for providing customer service, the #1 answer on the board by far was “Can’t Think of One”.

Now this was really surprising to us…we expected to see a bunch of the companies that often get publicized for providing superior customer service.

Admittedly, Amazon gets a lot of buzz, and their name was fairly big in the word cloud … but “Can’t Think of One” absolutely crushes them in terms of size. In fact, those companies that are often spoken about in the media and that we, as service executives, tend to think of as being the gold-standard, actually didn’t pop up very often at all.

And in a time when many executives and their teams are developing strategy for the next year, this is a pretty heartening piece of data. From the customer’s perspective, as products and service tends to seem exceedingly similar across suppliers, it is no surprise that the supplier’s ability to deliver insight drives the greatest loyalty impact. We call this ability to teach customers a new way to think about their business, Commercial Teaching.

What do you think? Is this good news, or troubling? Let us hear from you.

SEC Members, learn more about commercial teaching and the components of world-class insight. Also see how to identify your unique strengths and create a compelling commercial teaching pitch.