Customer service or rather poor customer service continues to be a major issue in many businesses. Maybe it is time to change the traditional solutions and truly embrace a sustainable approach.

Recently I came upon an interesting fact from the book Exceptional Customer Service: Going Beyond Your Good Service to Exceed the Customer's Expectation in how to deliver exceptional customer service. The Ritz Carlton Hotels provide all employees with a $2,000 budget to develop customer loyalty.

Management at this organization understands that unresolved problems are the quickest way to kill customer satisfaction not to mention customer loyalty. When problems are not resolved to the customers' expectations, repeat customers' expectations, these disenfranchised customers will tell a lot of people about their problem. And no one wants bad press especially this type of bad press.

By providing a budget and the authority, management allows the employees to move heaven and earth to resolve the problems to the customers' expectations Of course, you may think that this is far too much, but losing a customer is far more expensive.

Research suggests that it will cost six to 10 times to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing customer. If the Ritz Carlton $2,000 budget is spent on just keeping one customer, this represents a projected savings of $10,000 to $18,000.

Beyond having the authority, each employee must have the self-leadership skills to interact with customers and to know what actions to take. From effective communication including active listening skills to the critical higher order thinking skills of decision making and problem solving, all contribute to the bottom line results of exceptional customer service.

Unfortunately, much of the traditional customer service training does not develop self-leadership skills. And in many instances this training is delivered in the typical one or two days without opportunities for practice and feedback.

Customer Service Coaching Tip: Unless you are rewarding for great performance, do not send your people to those $97 to $197 one-day customer service training workshops. The return on investment is almost non-existent and may actually create more problems than you realize.

If you goal is to deliver exceptional customer service, make sure that your people have the authority to resolve customers' problems to their expectations and that they have the self leadership skills to make the entire experience incredible. For it is your internal customers, your employees, who can either make or break you because they are the front line when it comes to external customers' experiences.

Customer Service Coaching Tip: If you think you are already delivering exceptional customer service, you may wish to rethink that belief because less than 10% of your customers believe that to be true.