One of the leading problems in customer service right now lies in demonstrating true business value achieved.

Many customer service departments simply act as feedback aggregators. However, customer service departments which achieve and clearly demonstrate positive ROI act as valuable assets which help their company win in America’s competitive economy.

Even though the economy’s rocking right now, you know it will slow down sometime in the future. That’s just how it works.

And when that happens, senior leaders cut areas of the business which can’t demonstrate clear ROI.

You don’t want to be one of the first cuts at your company.

So here’s how you can drive your customer experience through the roof and drive clearly demonstrable value to your company:

1. What to Focus On

Confirmit, which compiles sophisticated research on customer service (and many other areas of business), recently completed a study on customer service.

They found three key drivers of customer experience success.

The first, “raising one rallying cry,” centers on using technology to gather feedback from customers and spreading that across your organization in a unified fashion so true change can happen.

The second, “focusing on better decisions,” means empowering team members across your entire organization to make more helpful decisions and to take true ownership of them.

The third, “prove your worth,” focuses on mapping your implemented decisions directly to tangible business value generated.

For further info, download the Confirmit report free here.

2. Walk Your Talk

No company actively promotes lousy customer service. Every company’s senior leadership talks directly about “exceptional customer service.”

But, the problem says Howard Lax, Principal Director of Customer Experience Consulting at Confirmit, is that senior execs,“still [do] too little walking.”

So, poor customer service experiences simply result from failing to follow through.

If you’re going to improve customer experience, you must have a tangible plan of action for implementing it.

And everyone, even your senior execs, must be accountable to someone for following through and making change happen.

3. How to Show Customer Experience ROI

This isn’t as hard as you might think. You don’t need to show net promoter score leads to a certain increase in overall business revenue. That actually is fairly indirect and hard to show.

This is actually quite simple to do. Instead, show the changes you made, the increase in the number of loyal customers, and the amount of revenue each new loyal customer generates.

You could also show the revenue impact from cross-selling and upselling customers. Take your number of customers, find the average number of products they order before and after customer service changes are implemented, and then report the average revenue each generates.

Yes. You can totally crush your competition’s customer experience. Because, more than likely, they’re making the mistakes outlined in this post.

Now that you know what to focus on, you can knock customer service (and your competition) out of the park!