Have you heard of the quest for the Holy Grail? Not the Monty Python version or the Indiana Jones version, but the real Holy Grail?

According to legend, if a person finds the Holy Grail it will grant miraculous powers to the finder - in some version of the tales everlasting life. But searching for the grail is challenging as its origins are shrouded in mystery and everyone has a different version of what it really is and how to find it.

Holy grail of customer service

This is remarkably like the quest for customer service. Businesses quest after customer service and like the grail find that it is not as easy to grasp as they thought. Many businesses questing after the customer service grail find they may create some great customer service systems, but they fail in practical implementation. They may give great service once or twice - but keeping it up is a greater challenge than finding the Grail in the first place.

Unfortunately, inconsistent customer service can be more damaging to a business than a history of average service. Think about it. You go to a restaurant and are blown away by the amazing service you receive. The chef comes out and shakes your hand and compliments you on your choices. The waiters become your best friends and everyone knows your name.

You tell everyone how great it is, and then bring a huge group of your friends to the restaurant proud and anticipatory. That night the chef is having disasters in the kitchen, so all you hear is a lot of swearing and certainly no visit to the table. They have hired a new waiter, who treats you efficiently - but at a distance. No one can remember your name.

Now if you have really boasted about this restaurant you would naturally feel a bit embarrassed in front of your friends. Will you dine there again? No. Would your friends dine there again? No.

Inconsistent customer service can be a real challenge to business - so how do you get around it? What you need to do is to make customer service integrated into every action of your employees and your service.

How you can do that is to:

Create checklists to be completed on every task.

Customer Service Checklist

One hotel chain in the US does this to a great extent requiring everything to be checked off for each room including favorite spirits in the fridge, favorite newspaper on the table, favorite music playing on the CD player. They have worked out what is important and for each of those points there is a checklist that must be completed by room staff to make sure nothing is missed.

In a service business you can create checklists of everything that needs to happen when you have a new client sign up to the company, to ensure no steps are missed.

Create reminders at Point of Sale

Most POS systems allow you to enter in reminders which range from the ubiquitous "would you like fries with that" up-sell recommendations to reminders to thank the client by name once the frequent shopper card has been swiped so the name appears in the POS. How can you maximize your POS to create consistent customer service?

Introduce one thing at a time and get it embedded as a habit

Many businesses go hell for leather and introduce lots of customer service strategies at the one time. This is like deciding to go on a fitness kick and deciding to radically change your diet and exercise for 1 hour per day every day if you have been a couch potato living on junk food. You are setting yourself up for failure!

Introduce one initiative at a time and get it embedded into the culture of the organization so that it is reliably and consistently performed before you add in another one. This will maximize your long term success. Yes, it may be slower, but the system will be sustainable.

Outsource It

In small business it is really hard to remember (or find time) to do all of the stages of a regular customer care program. This is where a great virtual assistant can help you. You create the system and let them take care of implementing it.

Measure and reward success

In life what is measured gets done and what is rewarded gets repeated. Using this knowledge you need to measure the most important parts of the customer service cycle and reward the employees who consistently perform well at these key areas.

Consistency of customer service is the key for business. If they do achieve the Holy Grail of consistent customer service - they won't achieve everlasting life, but they will get business sustainability and success.