Customer satisfaction standards
Once in a while, you come across this really amazing company which doesn’t look like the typical faceless corporate. There are just a handful of such companies whose policy is “Break company policy when the customer says so”. These companies go all out of their way to make the customer feel like he is getting value for what he has paid. Fedex, Amazon, Zappos lead the list of such companies.
I just thought of an idea which is something similar to “CE” and “Energy-Star” compliance marks on consumer products. Both denote to the customer something about the product’s conformity to a certain standard. Why isn’t there a similar compliance standard for the company’s customer service. Lets say we call this CSS (customer satisfaction standards). A company such as Amazon will be CSS compliant by default. However, its competitor may not be. This should automatically lead to many companies starting to focus towards customer satisfaction so as to get the CSS rating. Just the way, companies focus on 6-sigma, ISO standards etc. A CSS rating could easily help a company boost its sales.
However, I am not really sure how someone could make money by starting a accreditation service such as this. The only way I can think of is for the accrediting agency to provide consultancy to a non-CSS company towards becoming CSS-compliant.