6 Tips for Ensuring World-Class Service Delivery
In today’s ever evolving and digital world, customers are more savvy, knowledgeable and have more choices than ever before. Simply doing what you have always done, even it was massively successful in the past, is no longer good enough. This article details 6 Tips to Ensure a World-Class Service Delivery program by continuously focusing on your customer's perception of value, improving your customer’s experience (CX) and successfully engaging your employees.
1. Become customer centric
It’s all about understanding your customers and then building offerings that meet their needs, wants and desires. To be truly successful, your services must provide value as perceived by the customer.
“Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for." Peter Drucker
Value is whatever a customer perceives it to be. If they perceive it to be good value, then its good. If they perceive it to be bad value, then it is bad. If you want happy customers, you must know them. Know what they want, need and desire. Then build, deliver and improve everything you do around meeting these understandings to provide them value, from their perspective.
2. Listen to customers
This seems like common sense, but common sense is not always common. We all get caught up in doing our daily jobs and activities and forget sometimes why we are there. In every engagement, it is easy to get to the core of what success looks like by simply asking the customer and listening to their response. For example, right at the beginning of an engagement, I ask customers something like, “If this project is 100% successful, 30-60-90 days, 6 months, a year down the road, what does it look like to you?” Listen to their answer, take notes and repeat back the critical success factors (CSF) they described, as you heard and understood them. The goal is to make sure you have successfully captured the points and have them correct. This helps get everyone on the same page and have a very clear understanding of what, how and when to do things to ensure success.
"The future of communicating with customers rests in engaging with them through every possible channel: phone, e-mail, chat, Web, and social networks. Customers are discussing a company’s products and brand in real time. Companies need to join the conversation.” Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com
Next, build plans and activities around those CSFs. Keep a copy of these CSFs and review them often with the team to ensure you stay focused on not only the daily activities, but what the customer really wants. Finally, review these CSFs with the customer periodically to make sure they are still accurate or if there are any changes that need to be incorporated.
3. Make it easy
Customers are reviewing your company with every interaction your company has with them, good or bad. At its most basic, customers are thinking about how easy or how hard it is to work with your company with every interaction they have. It’s not so much about how easy, but how hard they perceive it to be.
“Humans may neurologically or physiologically predisposed towards focusing on negative information.” Stuart Soroka, London School Economics
It makes sense then, that customers notice when things are hard and act on their perceptions of those hard things more often than the easy ones. It is critical to help them see how easy it is to work with your company, especially compared to your competition. This does not mean speaking negatively about your competition to the customer (that approach never works, will backfire and is professionally bad-form). Rather, understanding what makes the interactions hard and then doing everything you can to make them easier. It is about what you do, not just what you say you will do. If you make it easy for your customer, your customers will love and reward your company with more, ongoing and repeat business.
4. Hire the right people
What does “right people” mean? There are many things to look for in a candidate when hiring. There are three things to key in on when hiring team members;
- Customer Service knowledge, skills and experience
- Technical knowledge, skills and experience
- How well someone fits with the team/culture
Technical skills are easy to assess. Basically, does the candidate have the requisite knowledge, skills and experience to do the job? Most hiring managers spend all of their interviewing time on these types of questions/conversations. Based on these technical conversations, managers can determine if the candidate’s technical skills and ability is a good fit for the position. Additionally, these technical conversations help managers determine if the candidate might be a good fit with the team. For example, determining if the candidate speaks, acts, troubleshoots, goes to the same seminars or user groups, etc., as the current team members do. We tend to “like” (and hire) those people who are “like” us.
"Your company must have a rigorous interview process and ask some forward thinking questions to immediately identify if the candidate is truly customer-focused." Michel Falcon
Possessing the correct technical knowledge, skills and experience and even fitting in the team culture perfectly is not enough. To be successful, you must also think about your customers when interviewing and hiring. You can hire the most technically proficient person, who fits perfectly in your team, but if they upset your customer (for any reason), the trusted advisor relationship that you have worked so hard to build will suffer, or even worse, end (for your company, your employee or both). Therefore, you must evaluate the candidate’s customer care skills and behaviors, before hiring them. I often tell people, “we can train anyone who is willing to learn, how to be good at a technical vocation (e.g. Help Desk, Desktop Support, DBA, Network Admin, Programmer, Project Manager, Team Lead, etc.). While we can hone and help mature someone’s customer care skills, we can’t teach someone HOW to care. Caring is something they either have or they don’t. Trying to teach someone to care is like trying to teach a fish to ride a bicycle.” It is critical to ensure you ask customer care questions to understand how the candidate will handle interactions with your customer, not just the technical questions.
5. Remove road blocks
"It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do." Steve Jobs
I love this quote and think it is a great start, however, I think it is incomplete. What’s missing? In a word, Action. We need to act upon what these smart employees tell us to do by listening, understanding and acting to get any roadblocks out of their way, to reap the benefits of what they are telling us to do, in a way that meets the customer’s wants, needs and expectations (see Tip 1).
To remove roadblocks, you really need to observe your team, in their environment. As Taiichi Ohno, father of the Toyota Production System (a.k.a. Lean), said “watch!" You must get out there and see what, how, where, when and to what extent they do what they do. Ask them questions, find out what the roadblocks are in making something work better and determine what they think could be done to make things right. Gathering the information alone however, is not enough. It is very important to do something with the information. It is critical that you follow up and engage the employees with the findings, recommendations and any changes before implementation. If you listen and observe, but never follow-up, or make changes without communicating in advance, team members will lose trust in you and will stop sharing. So, watch, find the roadblocks, then do what you can to remove them, and communicate with your team before, during and after the entire process. Then, you guessed it, watch some more and continually make improvements. The process never ends.
6. Train your team
A lot of managers I have worked with in the past believed that it is solely an employee's job to maintain their skills, procure their own training and manage their own career path, without the direction or assistance of the employer. While there is merit to the idea that people care more about knowledge that they pay for themselves, the problem with this mentality is, if you leave training solely on the employees shoulders, they will either not train often enough or even at all (remember they are providing services to your customers – trained or not), or they may hold their newly gained, personally procured knowledge against your organization as a badge of martyrium. This can result in them disrupting the team, customer environment and even lead to the employee leaving for greener pastures.
"Skilling your staff is good for your business and good for your workforce. Training can improve business performance, profit and staff morale." Government of South Australia
Remember, everyone has gaps in their skills sets at some point in their career. For example, while the overall timeline varies greatly depending on specialties, a physician in the U.S. will go to school for 10 to 16 years before becoming a licensed physician. That’s a lot of school, but it doesn’t stop there. Physicians continually learn by going to school, seminars and trainings for the remainder of their careers. Can you imagine going to a physician that finished all their required schooling to become a doctor in 1980, and then never went to another day of school/training in their career? Probably not. Remember, customers’ perceptions decide whether they choose to do business with your company in the future or not. Your goal therefore, should be to ensure each team member’s competencies (knowledge, skills, and behaviors) to produce value to your customer is as strong, current and relevant as possible. An added benefit to this approach is that it improves employee engagement, increases morale and reduces turnover.
Summary
If you put the customer at the center of all that you do and take care of your team members, you can’t go wrong. Customers choose what is of value to them. They will choose the extent of what they need, want and desire, how much they are willing to pay for it. If you engage with customers to understand what that means to them, deliver it to them, both now and through emerging trends/technologies, and support your team members by getting road blocks out of their way and helping continuously build their knowledge, skills, and behaviors, your will ensure your operational service delivery success, improve your customer’s experience (CX) and rally your employee’s engagement.
Learn more
To learn more about our Integrated Service Management (ISM), Customer Experience (CX) strategies or career paths at NuAxis, leave a comment here or visit us at www.NuAxis.com.
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About the Author
Bob Roark is the VP Service Management for NuAxis Innovations, AXELOS Ambassador, bestselling author, speaker, trainer, and recognized as one of America’s PremierExperts?. MBA graduate of Western Governors University and holds multiple advanced certifications including ITIL? V3 Expert (ITIL? Lifecycle: SS, SD, ST, SO, CSI, MALC), PMP, Integrated Service Management Essentials, HDI Support Center Director, ISACA CISA and Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP).
? 303-514-8958 | ? [email protected] | LinkedIn: www.dhirubhai.net/in/bobroark/ | Twitter: @bobroarkdotcom | NuAxis Innovations: www.nuaxis.com | Personal site: www.bobroark.com