Customers have more and more choices in today’s market. Serving them well must be a primary business focus if you are to stay competitive. Their expectations must be understood if they are to be met. Consistently exceeding expectation is even better.
Use every means possible to track and measure customer satisfaction. Improve practices to make it easier to delight and retain customers. Use recognition and reward to maintain the service level customers demand.
Take care of your customer, so you’ll get a chance to take care of them again in the future.
Service Matters
You may be as appalled as I am by the lack of quality service everywhere you turn. In a way, we have become so desensitized by poor service and bad attitudes that we are startled when we receive even moderately good service.
This is a great reason to strive for excellent service: it will startle our customers, and keep them coming back for more.
A friend recently drove to a gas station to fill up, and noticed that he was low on oil. He was dressed for a meeting, and asked if the attendant could add the oil. He said he couldn’t: company policy. You got to be kidding!
Imagine if he had replied, “I’d be happy to add the oil. You are welcome to enjoy a complimentary cup of coffee from our convenience store while I take care of that for you.” Which approach has a better chance of getting the customer to return again and again?
One-of-a-kind products and killer pricing may be differentiators, but these advantages can change as the market changes, and maintaining them can be costly. Excellent service, to be fair, is also not without its cost, but it can be a powerful differentiator in an age of declining service levels. It is also a more rewarding pursuit for employees and managers.
Don’t Be Afraid to Ask
You can’t rely on your own perceptions or the occasional voluntary feedback to determine how well you are meeting cutomer expectations. It is important to ask questions like, “How well are we doing?” or, “What can we do better?” Listen to customer complaints, and make things right quickly when you fall short. The people who regularly field complaint calls are a valuable source of information.
To ensure you get useful and consistent feedback, I recommended that you implement a systematic measuring process. This can be done in different ways –phone calls, internet surveys, or specialized third party interviewers. You can also bring together a focus group of customers to review service perceptions, discuss their expectations, and brainstorm what else can be done to serve them better.
The key is to clearly understand how effectively you are serving your customers, and what else you could be doing to retain them.
Foster a Service Environment
Leaders at all levels must make customer satisfaction a priority. If leaders don’t pay attention to customer satisfaction, then why should employees?
I remember working for a large company where our customer setup process for billing was so poor, it didn’t matter how good the sales process was. There was a high probability that the customer would be so dissatisfied they would never come back again. I used gift packs to apologize for the poor service until we could get it fixed.
Sometimes getting the systems fixed and the people retrained takes time. I had to let both our customers and the sales force know that this was not how we wanted to do business. We were committed to getting it fixed!
Attaining high levels of service excellence needs to be a company-wide goal. Expectations need to be set, training and support needs to be examined, and the results measured. Excellent service must be rewarded.
Recognize Best Practices
I’m convinced that the people who regularly do the work of serving customers know how to improve the system. Employees know what gets in the way of providing the best level of service. Leaders can facilitate improvements by bringing employees together to explore how to serve customers.
In every company, there are individuals who provide extraordinary service. Find these individuals and celebrate their successes. Identify what it is they are doing that is working, and use these best practices to improve service levels elsewhere.
Customers are watching. They want to see if your service merits their continued patronage. Employees are watching. They look to leaders to determine what’s important.
Many things are important for companies to be successful. If leaders neglect service, then all their other efforts may go unnoticed because customers simply won’t come back.
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Tags: Culture, Customers, Expectations, Feedback, Service
Jerry Baker began his career in the management development program at Ford Motor Company, later became a manager of budgets and analysis for Northrop Corporation, then furthered his management development as Deputy Director for the California Department of Commerce when Ronald Reagan was Governor.