Customer service begins with a customer-focused system

Exceptional customer service must begin with a well-oiled internal system.

So how do we make sure that our systems and processes are aligned with what our customers need and want?

Here are three of the many important factors that we have to consider.

As we open the New Year, we all wish to do better with our businesses. We know that one of the more important factors to put focus on is customer service.

In our earlier post, we defined customer service as the total customer experience with our brands.

Customer service is a practice that ensures our customers experience unique and personalized connection with our products and services from the beginning until the end of every transaction. It is how we develop our consumers’ personal relationship with or brands.

As we have suggested, customer service is how we design our consumers’ journey from information gathering, purchase, and post purchase, to be as easy as possible, as pleasant and productive as possible.

The question now is, how do we develop good customer service in our businesses?

The answer could be this: customer service begins with a customer focused system.

So how do we make sure that our systems and processes are aligned with what our customers need and want?

Here are three of the many important factors that we have to consider:

1. Build in the right features that are relevant to the customers

To our customers, the primary reason why they do business with us is for them to be able to address their specific concerns. In the supermarket, they choose our brand over an ocean of other brands along the aisle; they remember our home delivery numbers or choose to key in our websites, among the many options that they have. For a reason: they perceive our products to be the solution to their pressing needs.

Customers only willingly do businesses with the brands that they trust and have grown to be in love with. They rarely do business with cold and distant strangers.

Trust and love, are products of repeated pleasant customer experience. Pleasant customer experience is determined by the quality of products and services that we provide them. Relevant and pertinent quality that we provide to our customers establish brand affinity.

Relevant quality, more importantly, determines our level of service to our customers. This includes product value, ease of use, and product/service experience. Relevant quality means building in product and service features that are most important to the buyers, not necessarily what we deem as important.

We should not forget the fact that we do not just sell hammers – we sell solutions. It may be to help build a dream house, put together a little girl’s doll house, or help build a young man’s dream of opening a neighborhood store.

Or maybe, if we are in the airline business, we do not only satisfy the need to travel but we provide for our customers opportunities to discover a whole new wide world, of opening doors in a new land, or maybe coming home and reunite with loved ones.

By designing our products and services to provide relevant and quality solutions, we must consider how they are to be used. We must understand how our consumers intend to use the product. This establishes the groundwork for good customer service.

Doing this involves everyone in the organization from research and development, marketing, sales, finance, and operations.

2. Always be reliable

Customer trust and love as we said are synonymous to good business. And being faithful to this relationship means being dependable in all situations.

Businesses and brands are being relied on by customers in their times of needs – and these needs exist 24/7. This is why, service reliability is important to them.

Reliability means delivering our goods and services as specified and promised in our marketing materials and in the standard spiels of our sales people. No short-changes, no under-delivery.

Reliability is often required in the hospitality business. This is also true for service intensive brands in various categories such as finance, health, transportation, telecommunications, leisure, and even entertainment.

Businesses can develop service reliability by designing a system that will allow everyone in the organization to both standardize and equally personalize responses to the consumers’ unique needs.

Confused yet?

By standardizing the quality of service, we know that our front liners need to follow the high bar every time they interact with our clients. Allowing them to personalize, on the other hand, will provide customer-interfacing personnel ample leeway to address the specific needs of individual customers.

Patrons will also appreciate businesses that provide them multiple easy and accessible channels to connect with in times of trouble. This is where our call centers, websites, apps, and customer care centers play big roles.

3. Create a seamless customer service loop

A customer-focused service system provides for a seamless customer loop. Developing this mechanism allows us to closely put our ears to the ground and hear the tremor of real customer demands.

Today, customers have a plethora of channels to express their opinions – Facebook, Twitter, and a multitude of other social networking sites. This is where they follow influencers or influence millions of others – to make or break our brands. To ride this wave, our businesses should be able to actively listen to their voices and demands.

Closer to home, we also need to provide for easier customer access through our intuitive websites, customer-service hotlines (manned by humans, and not by robots), and even brick and mortar mailboxes!

Hearing our customers though is not enough. We have to make them feel important by reaching out to them and letting them know that their opinions and concerns are important to us. We have to act on their requests as soon as possible.

Customer complaints? (Should have been nipped in the bud if we embraced focused customer service!) This should be addressed as soon as possible. We should go beyond sorry and standard spiels by assuring our dissatisfied customers that we will address their concerns in the shortest possible time and ensure that their next experience will be better.

Bad experience should not be aggravated by passing customers from one agent to the other. At least at the first point of contact, any discomfort should be alleviated. Do not make it a habit to let 24-hours go by without any resolution. Establish a system to address any concern as easily as possible, as fast as operationally possible.

In summary, we have to remember that customer service involves total customer experience with our products and services. This means that we have to make sure that receive unique and personalized connection with our brands.

To achieve this, we have to ensure that we begin with our own internal systems: our culture of doing business, product design, processes, and customer interaction channels.

For this to run smoothly like a well-oiled machine, everyone, every department in the organization must be actively involved.

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Do you have anything more to add to this list? Please let us know in the comments section.

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Ken Lerona is an experienced Marketing Communications professional with special interest in PR, Media, and Customer Relations. He has more than 10 years of extensive experience in strategic and tactical aspects of Marketing including below-the-line activation, above-the-line campaigns, and online efforts. His background covers various industries ranging from FMCG, retail and leisure, telecommunications, and real estate.