Deliver awesome customer service, or go out of business. Is it really that important? Yes!! Consumers today can buy pretty much anything they want over the Internet, where they can easily compare prices across multiple vendors and have products delivered to their homes at no additional charge. How in the world can you compete against that? By making customers love your company so much that they’re willing to get in their cars and drive across town to visit you because of the way you and your staff make them feel and the wonderful experience they have when spending money at your business.
I think most businesses understand that customer service is critical to their success, but they often struggle when figuring out exactly how to deliver highly differentiated and valued customer service. Here are five steps you can take to significantly improve the level of service you deliver to your customers.
1. Remember that the ONLY person who defines excellent customer service is your customer. So, you have to own the voice of the customer and listen to them carefully in order to deeply understand exactly what their service expectations are and then build your service delivery systems to meet or exceed those expectations every time.
2. Once you understand your customers’ expectations, you must take the necessary time and thought to build a set of customer service standards and processes that will allow you to consistently deliver superior service. Now, let me make it clear: I hate process and I can’t stand spreadsheets and checklists…but I know that if you want repeatable success, you must have process and you must have repeatable success in your service delivery.
3. After you have developed customer service standards that set clear, specific and measurable customer service delivery processes, you must train, train, train — and then train some more to make sure everyone on your team knows exactly how to deliver great service.
4. As a manager or leader, it is your responsibility to monitor performance carefully, reinforce the standards and help people constantly improve at delivering superior customer service. It is also essential that you hold people 100 percent accountable for always living up to the standards and following the processes. When they do, celebrate success lavishly…when they don’t, deal decisively with mediocrity.
5. Lastly, create several ways to continuously listen to your customers and measure their level of satisfaction. Make a big deal out of tracking your customer satisfaction levels, keeping them high, and changing or adapting your standards and processes any time you need to in order to make sure that customer satisfaction is superb. This should be an ongoing process that involves looking at customer feedback and satisfaction surveys every week or at least every month.
These aren’t the only things it takes to build a culture of superb customer service, but I believe that if you do these five things with discipline, you will see a dramatic positive increase in your level of customer satisfaction, which will absolutely impact your total revenues and business success.
JOHN SPENCE has been recognized as one of America’s top 100 business thought leaders and as one of the top 500 leadership development experts in the world. He is the author of four books on business and life success. www. johnspence.com
TO BUILD YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE STANDARDS, ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS:
1. Why is delivering superior customer service important to our business?
2. What are the most important things our customers believe defines excellent customer service?
3. How, specifically, do we want our customers to feel after doing business with us?
4. What are the specific steps, processes and protocols we must follow in order to deliver consistently superior customer service? (Point four should be formulated in a manner that is highly prescriptive but still allows for judgment and discretion to be used by the employee.)
AN EXAMPLE OF SOME GENERAL CUSTOMER SERVICE STANDARDS:
• We will greet our customers in a courteous, welcoming and professional manner.
• We will listen effectively to our customers’ requests and promptly take the necessary actions to assist them.
• We will keep our customers informed of unexpected problems or delays in service.
• We will respond to customer voicemails promptly (within two hours or by the next business morning if after business hours).
• We will respond to website questions or requests within 24 hours during normal business hours.
• We will finish our encounters with our customers in a courteous and professional way and always thank them for their business.