By Chris Bucholtz

I’ve written about this in the past, but it bears repeating: All the CRM technology, process refinement, customer intelligence and sales efficiency in the world is worthless unless your company is truly customer-focused, and never more so than when a customer has a service issue. One bad service experience can turn all the relationship-building a company does into nothing more than hollow promises and unmet expectations. It’s like a friendship: It’s easy to pal around when things are going well, but your real friends are there in tough times. And the companies that understand this have the opportunity to turn tough times into long-term loyalty.

In service-intensive industries – cable television, telecommunications, utilities – you’d think that providers would have seized on these opportunities a long time ago. Their customer relationships start with a service call, and any future service calls are likely to be urgent, since these industries represent technologies we’ve grow to take for granted. But even in churn-intensive areas like telecommunications, service has taken a back seat.

Why? “So many businesses are focused on creating the next big thing, the next great product, and fail to see the value of putting the focus on service,” says Yuval Brisker, CEO of TOA. “As a result, a lot of intensely creative people are focused on innovation in products, but very few are given the opportunity to innovate around supporting the customer.”

Brisker’s company works at solving one obvious area with room for improvement – customer appointment management. The goal is to move away from the old model – “Our technician will be there between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.” – and move to a new one where customers are kept informed, the service window is narrowed – and providers end up saving money, too. For example, in cases where a customer must leave during that window, there should be a system in which the customer can call and let the provider know this data, and which allows the data to be routed to service personnel. Without it, a technician may visit an empty house, delaying the customer’s service and necessitating another visit. Each visit can cost between $400 and $1000 – so making sure that every visit goes to a ready customer is important.

“You want a chain of communication to the customer,” said Brisker, “so they know they can make that call and it’ll be heard and acted upon, and so they know when service will arrive.” TOA delivers that in a SaaS solution, with a self-learning capability that updates the system’s reactions based on past customer patterns.

Those are the basics of what TOA is providing, but Brisker sees the opportunity to be much larger. He sees these industries in need of harnessing some of the intelligence they collect about their users and expanding their loyalty-building efforts from service calls to other areas. “For example, we all see the offers made to new customers, but what about the customers who stay with providers?” he said. “How can we make them feel we care for them and the $70 or $80 a month they spend for services? That constituency needs to be taken care of, and there’s a need to acknowledge loyalty in the long term.”

But that again goes to the idea that innovators don’t get directed to customer service, Brisker said. “Service has been relegated to the backwater,” he said. “You just can’t provide a great product and then have creativity stop there.”