The importance and value of cultivating and maintaining customer relationships cannot be overstated. Any business that fails to cater to their customers in ways that are business efficient as well as positively reinforcing, are doing themselves a great disservice. Businesses tend to understate the importance of customer relations management, only focusing on problem solving, rarely prevention. This is a mistake that can cost them dearly. It is rare that businesses can be effective and efficient in all areas. There are three big benefits to having a separate customer service division:
Communication
Few businesses have entirely separate divisions for customer communications. Usually, there are either a few trained representatives who handle customer problems, or there are overworked representatives from other departments who are expected to handle customer problems as they are mistakenly transferred to them without proper training. This mistake does customers and businesses a disservice. Not only is a customer not helped properly, but businesses lose out opportunities to bolster their efficiency by having an entire department dedicated to the customer. A separate division increases customer satisfaction as well as employee morale.
Qualitative & Quantitative
When there is a department specifically dedicated to customer service, there is more of an emphasis on customers' satisfaction; and there are more methods employed to measure satisfaction. Ideally, there should be representatives hired to purely handle the people aspect of customer service quality assurance, and there should be those specifically hired to deal with the analytics behind the scenes. In a department setting such as this, there should be an emphasis on customer surveying and reviewing that will be translated into data that keeps the big picture in mind, and evaluates performance.
Prevention Instead of Solving
With a separate department that is focused on qualitative and quantitative service, there is room to use data gathered to implement changes that would make businesses as a whole more efficient and leave customers more satisfied. While customers like to feel that you care about them and can effectively solve their problems, if businesses can show customers that they listen to their feedback and actually apply changes to prevent similar problems in the future; they can win their loyalty.