Customer Service Goes Local

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Delivering local service is even within reach for the mega-businesses such as cell phone service providers, cable companies, and banks. To do so, it is critical for these companies to understand what is important to local communities. In other words, they need to be creative about ways to get in their customers' shoes. Companies like Verizon (VZ) and Citigroup (C) can leverage their scale to collect local information about the customer experience through their retail outlets.

The Community Call Center?

To act on this information, these companies need to make connections between internal functions—for example, between retail stores and call centers. Information collected locally must be shared throughout this network. If call center agents are armed with these data, they will be more successful in making empathetic connections with the customer. Rarely do these large companies make use of the powerful internal networks they have at their disposal—a missed opportunity to make scale a benefit in terms of delivering local service.

In the case of companies that do not have the advantage of many retail outlets—for example, cable companies—agents on the phone must simulate face-to-face interactions. Employees empowered to engage in dialogue with customers—as they would in person instead of simply following a script or adhering to strict call-time metrics—can make connections that influence customer satisfaction and loyalty. These agents can create a sense of community by engaging customers about their overall needs and ideas beyond the stated reason they called. Furthermore, employees who are engaged in problem-solving with customers are an important source of often untapped knowledge regarding how customers will respond to future innovations.

Driving Loyalty and Profitability

In some cases structural barriers may have to be removed to facilitate local service. For example, Macy's (M) is changing its field structure to become more local by removing management layers built up over time due to growth and acquisition. By placing decision-makers closer to the stores instead of in headquarters they are better positioned to compete on a local level, while reducing management cost.

Locally sourced and manufactured products are not sustainable for big business, but the emotional connection customers and employees get from them is achievable in other ways. Delivering local service creates an emotional connection with customers that transcends even the first taste of apple cider each fall, and drives long-term loyalty and profitability.

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Traci Entel is a principal at Katzenbach Partners, a management consulting firm. She is the author of The Empathy Engine: Turning Customer Service into a Sustainable Advantage, which describes how companies can use empathy as the key lever to improve customer service.