Get Obsessed About Customer Service Excellence
Today's customers are better educated, more discriminating, more cost-conscious, less loyal, better informed, have more choices, and are more "service savvy" than ever! They also have very high expectations. This holds true regardless of what you sell or offer. They expect a frictionless and personalized experience.?
A Few Customer Service Tips to Improve Your Level of Service
- Consistently seek ways to make it easier for customers to do business with your company.?Hold a contest! Ask your employees to develop an idea to make this happen. The award goes to the person who gave the idea that has been implemented and proven to work.?Make it a great reward! I have a client who is a dealer in the automotive industry. His company saw an increase in customer service ratings and better yet - customer loyalty.
- Seek out eliminate any customer service flaws and eliminate problems. Just remember, sometimes it's not what's the problem, but?who's?the problem! Have the courage to remove anyone from your team that is holding back the service excellence reputation you desire. You can't afford a week player.
- Ask these two questions frequently: "What are you hearing in the field?"?"Is there anything I should know about?"
- More questions: "How can we streamline our service?" "How can we cut red tape?"
- Ensure your "internal customers" are being served and your external customers. It can't happen on the outside if it doesn't happen on the inside.?
- Personalize the service experience. Think of ways you can achieve this.?
- Create "guiding principles" for treating customers and each other. Treat everyone like family and call people by name.?Make people accountable to adhere to them. Show them to new hires at the onboarding session.
- Hold weekly meetings to discuss "Hits, Runs, and Misses. (Many clients LOVE this idea.)
- Practice Proactive Complaint Prevention. When a problem or complaint occurs, ask your team, "What should we have done to prevent this from happening? What should we do to prevent this from EVER happening again?
- Create a Problem Resolution Report for executives so they can stay informed. They should pick up the phone to call customers to make sure they are happy. I have one client that visits the customer when a problem occurs.
- Over-communicate and over-compensate when you err.
- Ensure everyone in the company displays a sense of urgency to respond to customers for simple requests, especially complaints.
- Make sure every leader treats employees like family! Create "guiding principles on how you will treat employees and make sure every leader adheres to them.
- Train people. Don't assume your team knows how to deliver exceptionally great service. Train them on how to deal with demanding customers and situations. Train your leaders. Everything starts and stops with leadership! Provide training on stress management too. Today's business environment is very stressful.
- Never be satisfied where you are. Continuous improvement should be one of your core values.?
These are just a few simple customer service tips that can make a big difference in your level of service. Make it an obsession to deliver the highest level of service for every customer every day.
Already doing these things? Great. Then my question is, "How well are you doing them?”?If you read these and said to yourself?“I should be applying these customer service tips, remember:
Knowing What You Should Do, and Doing Them are Two Very Different Things. Do it!?
In today's world of uncertainty about the future, you can't afford to lose a single customer or have one of them post negative remarks about your company on the Internet. Get obsessed!
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