Customer service is no longer warm and fuzzy
Informed management and staff no longer regard customer service as the “soft fuzzy stuff”, but rather a competitive edge that can yield tangible bottom line results. Quite reasonably, they expect to engage with knowledgeable, sincere, reliable and understanding staff. Customers and clients will leave in droves if they don’t perceive they are getting the service standard they believe they should be getting from your business.
Worse still, they will pass on this message of dissatisfaction to others and take their business straight to your competitor. Quite possibly they will influence those they have talked to, to do the same.
Walt Disney was right on the money when he said, “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.”
If you want to operate competitively, productively and profitably, your staff must provide exemplary customer service consistently. This will increasingly be the main differentiator between your business and your competitors because excellent service delivery is the catalyst in creating new customers, keeping loyal customers and developing referrals for future customers.
Tie everything back to your customer service framework
Your staff should genuinely want to help customers and clients no matter their role or responsibilities, the situation, or how busy they may be. They should never see customers as interruptions to their day, or feel that an acceptable customer service philosophy involves just reciting a few insincere words.
Employ best practice customer service principles, initiatives and strategies across your business and ensure all staff are trained in using them – and use them.
Start the best practice process by hiring staff across the business who will automatically and consistently employ this attitude in any transaction they have with customers or clients. Staff who sincerely enjoy helping people and display an honesty and friendliness that far surpasses any superficiality of standard sayings such as ‘Have a nice day.’
Drive everything in your business with a customer focus. Strategies should include aiming to exceed customer expectations and needs, creating and implementing service standards, and developing a written plan for providing and maintaining customer excellence. Have a strategy for dealing with difficult customers.
Ensure that all staff understand the important roles they play in ‘being useful’ to every customer, and helping the business achieve success. Keep them constantly trained, rewarded and recognised for demonstrating best practice customer service.
Aim to consistently smash the barriers to excellence in customer service.
Customers may not always be right in reality, but we can’t argue with their perceptions of the service provided, because those perceptions translate into bottom line results.
Infiltrate your processes, practices and attitudes
Customers, both external and internal, are the life blood of your business. Exemplary customer service is essential for your business to thrive because the service you provide is primarily responsible for creating new customers, keeping loyal customers, and developing referrals for future customers.
Customers and clients buy or deal with people they like, and people they feel comfortable creating a relationship with. If you provide great customer service, you are building on this relationship and enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
In the wise words of Richard C Whiteley, author of The Customer Driven Company: “The only right way to run a company and the most profitable way is to saturate your company with the voice of the customer.”
Be a customer-driven company. Infiltrate all your processes, practices and attitudes with a customer focus and voice. This will ensure that in this age of instant communication satisfied customers will tell every person they know about the service they experienced when dealing with your business. The benefits are huge.
