There is so much lip service paid to customer service that even those businesses that provide lousy customer service begin believing their own hype about how the customer comes first. The fact is that most businesses do a very poor job of serving their customers. Many have simply fooled themselves into thinking that they are doing a wonderful job of providing outstanding service. Avoid being one of those businesses.
Nothing short of outstanding customer service should be acceptable in any business. But virtually every day we run into examples of customer service that ranges from pitiful to barely acceptable. Rarely do we encounter truly outstanding service.
Outstanding customer service does just that....it stands out. The fact that most businesses are clueless when it comes to instilling a customer service culture that accepts nothing short of outstanding represents opportunity for your business. If you can master the art of serving the customer, you have the opportunity to differentiate your company, or stand out, from your competition and gain a competitive advantage.
Outstanding customer service requires several things:
1) a sincere and powerful commitment to serving customers and prospective customers at the highest possible level each and every time,
2) excellent people,
3) stringent expectations and policies regarding how customers are served along with a high level of accountability for enforcing those expectations and policies and
4) a discipline about serving customers consistently in manner that not only meets customer expectations, but often exceeds them.
Achieving outstanding customer service means hard work and attention to detail as well.
In order to deliver outstanding customer service consistently, each and every facet of your business must be "fine tuned". Because each part of a business is interconnected, each has the ability to create either favorable or unfavorable impressions with customers. For example, a customer might order a product and have a great experience placing the order and receiving it on time. But they discover a billing error and deal with accounts receivable to clear it up. In doing so, the customer encounters a rude employee that is less than helpful. All of the hard work to please the customer in ordering and shipping the product is wiped out by another area of the company. We emphasize that all employees should fully understand what their roles are in providing outstanding customer service. And all employees must be held accountable for delivering it.
Outstanding customer service must become a way of life for your employees. It must be focused on and become almost a mantra with employees. They should have some healthy fear about delivering anything less than outstanding service. Hiring employees that are capable of delivering outstanding customer service is critical to your efforts. Some people simply cannot deliver outstanding service consistently. And the key here is consistency.
Once excellent employees are in place, they must be trained and retrained continuously. They must be evaluated based on, among other things, their ability to deliver outstanding customer service to both internal and external customers. An employee having a bad day is unacceptable as an excuse for delivering less than outstanding customer service. Employees must be "on" every hour of every day that they are on the job. You can't expect anything less. Customers don't care that an employee is having personal problems or isn't feeling well. They want to be served at a high level.
The success of your business is directly tied to how well customers are served. Remember that your focus should be on building value in your business. One way of doing so is to increase your customer base over time. Delivering outstanding customer service will help ensure that your base of customers does increase rather than deteriorate.
Your company should have a well conceived customer service program in place. This program clearly defines how the company will hire, how and when it will train employees in customer service and it documents procedures and clearly delineates company customer service policies. It also outlines how employees will be evaluated and how customer satisfaction will be measured. If there are incentive plans based on delivering outstanding customer service, those should be detailed in the program as well. In short, outstanding customer service won't happen without a well conceived and well managed approach to making it happen.
