Your customers are 'Your Business', without them you essentially have no business.

I am going to instruct you in how to fine-tune your customer service using a technologist's approach, which will enable you dramatically improve your customer satisfaction ratings, gain a continuous stream of referrals, and encourage life-time loyalty from your clients and customers.

Before I begin, ask yourself the following questions;

Do you know what your customers really think about your current level of service?

Are they impressed, highly satisfied and fiercely loyal to you and your brand?

What would make them want to remain a life time customer of yours and continuously refer others to you?

If you cannot answer these three important questions with complete conviction and precision, then consider there is an immediate pressing opportunity to significantly improve your overall customer service performance, and standards.

Improving your service standards must start with making an un-wavering commitment to 'excellence in customer service'. With an organizationally driven vision of 'excellence in service' you and your team will become empowered and constantly motivated to champion and commit 100% to driving a improved performance level of service throughout your organization and daily operations.

A technologist's approach to customer service improvement focuses on three critical stages:

Identifying performance impediments

Addressing the source of under-performance

Establishing desirable performance outputs, benefits and measures

Stage One.

To identify existing performance impediments to customer service in your organization, you first need to learn all you can about 'what's really going on' with your service delivery.

To collect this information the following tools can be used:

Surveys, questionnaires, objective testing

First hand observations

Auditing and analysis

Interviews

Records of unsolicited reports of problems and complaints

From this information it should become clear what service performance impediments exist.

Stage Two.

The next step is to then acknowledge and address the source of underperformance.

The following questions will enable you to determine and act upon the second stage of the customer service improvement process, addressing the source of under-performance.

Based on the collated research from stage one, identifying performance impediments, ask the following important questions:

What is customer service staff doing, or not doing, to cause the identified problem?

What is customer service staff unable to do that they should be able to do?

Stage Three.

The third step to improving your customer service standards is to establish what your desirable performance outputs are, what the benefits are going to be for your customers, and how you intend on measuring the successful achievement of these outcomes.

A simple approach to doing this is to draw up a table detailing a list of service tasks, desirable outputs, and benchmarks, standards or benefits that occur as a result to the task being performed. Refer example 1 below.

Task Output Benchmark, Standard, Benefit

Answering Telephone Handling Inbound Customer Enquiries Answer within 3 rings

Be polite courteous and helpful

Identify the customers need

Deliver a service to meet the customers need.