A decade ago, ‘customer is king’ was an almost universal corporate mantra, yet one observed more often in the breach than the observance.

By contrast, in today’s highly competitive IT markets, products have become more commoditised and, as a result, real differentiation must increasingly come from superior service and support. This means that companies now take this area of their operation seriously and no longer simply pay lip service to customer service quality, right?

Well yes, up to a point. However, there are still too many vendors who, through lack of real commitment, have yet to translate fine words into real actions.

So, in practical terms, what are the key elements of a truly customer-centric approach likely to make a vendor stand out from the noise?

• Communication as a three-way process (vendor to client, client to vendor, client to client): No business stands still and both the vendor’s offering and the client’s needs will change, perhaps significantly, over time. Central to success therefore is the need to establish effective two-way communication between all involved.

Firstly, the customer should be kept up-to-date with product changes and compliance issues, for example, via newsletters and other marketing communications.

Equally, the vendor needs to be constantly aware of what customers think and want, both informally and more formally through the use of user groups and regular customer satisfaction surveys. It should also be recognised that customer feedback provides important input more broadly into the product and business development programme.

And finally, the use of customer forums provides a valuable opportunity for clients to share with each other matters of mutual interest and concern.

• Rapid, ‘first pass’ response: On the one hand, it is important to put together a dedicated team to ensure superior service quality on a non-going basis. (And, in the case of a channel sale, this may well involve staff from several companies in the supply chain.)

Similarly, in responding promptly and effectively to customer issues, vendors should put processes in place to maximise the number of customer calls dealt with at first pass, by ensuring ready access to relevant technical and support staff. And for those calls which cannot be dealt with in one call, it is critical to manage customer expectations and deliver within agreed response times.

• Proactive support: However, it is no longer enough simply to be highly responsive to customer requests. To get ahead of the competition, a vendor must anticipate need, by ‘getting under the skin’ of both the client and their marketplace. And this highlights another corporate truism which frequently does not bear close scrutiny, that is, the desire to adopt a ‘partnership’ approach as the basis for creating long-term client relationships.

This cannot be achieved by, in effect, walking away after the sale has been completed and subsequently providing a purely reactive service. By contrast, it is essential to maintain regular contact with the customer, both pre- and post-sale, as part of an end-to-end, proactive approach which enables the vendor to flush out issues and recommend solutions before they become problems.

• Tailored market solutions: The ‘one size fits all’ product or solutions proposition is another dinosaur strategy whose day is past. Yet in defining an effective sales approach, a vendor must not only take into account the particular needs of each sector and company, but also the concerns and level of IT understanding of the individual client within the business.

• Business optimisation: many end-users still think in terms of point solutions for point problems. To provide a truly value-added service, vendors must take a step back and help the customer look at solutions, often linked other best-of-breed products, which will maximise benefit to the broader business. The key here is to help ensure clients have the best tools available in order that they can make fully informed business decisions.

There is a common denominator here. In many companies there remains a commonly-held, if misplaced, belief that your customers are dependent on you as the supplier. Yet in terms of the balance of power, the reality is very different: with customers increasingly willing to vote with their feet and go elsewhere, vendors now have to work harder than ever to retain existing clients and attract new business.

Typically this will require a sea-change in attitude and ethos across the whole business. In order to achieve this, at Lakeview we have implemented a Customer Charter which seeks to reflect a company-wide recognition of the importance of customer service.

In encapsulating how every department should manage customer interactions, the Charter achieves two important goals. First, it makes everyone fully aware of their responsibility to the customer, irrespective of their role or job title. Further, the customer benefits from a unified ‘one company’ response, by ensuring consistency of message and quality of service delivery.

The question remains however: with many, and often conflicting, pressures on today’s business, how far up the corporate agenda should quality of service sit? The answer, in short, is at or near the very top.

Failure to implement effective customer service strategies may not have an immediate catastrophic impact on the business. Yet it is now equally clear that, in a world where ever-more promiscuous customers have unparalleled choice, existing business will inexorably hemorrhage as customers switch to suppliers who show a genuine understanding and commitment to their business.

And so, longer term, the result will be equally devastating.