Do you believe good customer service has a direct impact on the profitability on a business?
An older study of the impact of CRM on the profitability of high technology firms provides additional detail and insight into the importance of customer service in the B2B (business-to-business) space. Another study by Accenture found that excellent CRM performance could improve a company's return on sales by as much as 64 percent over merely average performance. Ten CRM capabilities accounted for fully half the improvement in return on sales. Of those, five are clearly customer service capabilities:
? Strategically manage large account customers
? Develop effective customer service systems
? Proactively identify customer problems and communicate resolution options
? Leverage customer information from the service process
? Prevent customer problems via customer education
For each billion dollars in sales, Accenture estimated impact on increased profitability as follows:
? Customer service-$42 million
? Sales and account management-$35 million
? Marketing-$34 million.