Rocket Science: Marketing Intelligence for the Technology Industry





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A Global Model for Customer Service

Scenario: The world-famous CEO of a top-3 PC maker tasked his corporate marketing department to develop a customer service initiative to distinguish their global corporate-direct sales efforts. The director of corporate PR turned to Rocket Science and asked us to research any and all awards programs or events that recognize superior customer service in each of five global regions, and come up with recommendations for their five global managers.

Approach: After surveying the five global regions and contacting every major technology publisher, trade group, analyst organization, national and local government, and quality organization for awards and recognition opportunities, we determined that an exhaustive approach to winning customer service awards would overwhelm our client's resources. So in order to focus their efforts on the most important opportunities, we applied the Japanese “Kano” model for quality, which segments service delivery in terms of three factors:

Defect factors (the absence of which is neutral; the presence of which is very bad)
Progressive factors (the more of them, the better)
Delighting factors (the absence of which is neutral; the presence of which is exceedingly good)

We concluded that the last category — the delighting factors — should be where our client focus its energies in order to push its image and reputation for quality in a strategic direction. We proceeded to identify the esteemed quality associations (like the Malcolm Baldridge award in the U.S. and the Demming award in Japan) whose awards carried significant weight in a broad range of industries, as well as among consumers. While applying for these distinctions required considerable investment of time, energies were focused, and the application processes themselves had the ripple effect of improving the internal functions that result in delivering a superior customer experience.

Result: We then focused our client on the top-5 most prestigious service awards in each of the five global regions - compiling all deadlines, entry requirements, entry forms and other materials into a "live" database of URL links so that updates and additions could be automatically distributed. For regions that did not have at least five top-tier awards or service recognition opportunities, we recommended ways to extrapolate the awards entry criteria and thinking into their daily operations, and suggested metrics to measure the results.