Top 5 Customer Service Links: Customer Service as Differentiation

by Heidi Miller, Social Media Manager

Grab a cup of coffee, sit back and enjoy the five best customer service posts from the last week. On me. 🙂 This week, it’s all about differentiation: how to be not just better than the competition, but truly different.

• The best link of the week by far was from our friend John Jantsch over at Duct Tape Marketing. In Stop trying to be better than the competition, Jantsch posits pinpointing how your product or service is actually different from the competition’s, not just better. He quotes this exchange:

Again, this is sometimes a place where companies will say, “well, we
are different we have a better product, or we offer better service.”
Really, and do your competitors all suggest they offer crappy service?

• 8 tips for providing a superior customer service experience gives tried-and-true advice on just that: using service as a point of differentiation
• In Build your customer experience roadmap, Forbes writer Bruce Temkin promotes differentiation by obsessing about customer needs, not adding new features
• Want to be different by growing over the next year? Try Bucking the recession with exceptional customer service
• And if you can’t compete on price, compete on customer service. Another Forrester study shows that poor customer service costs firms customers: “Three out of four switched at least one product or service in the last two years, a survey of more than 2,000 people showed.”