Over the years having worked with many customer service training delegates and many companies in many industries I have come up with the 4 point customer service development mantra. You may have your own ideas about what makes exceptional customer service, what helps exceed customer expectations and what helps with delighting your customer.
The following 4 points are fundamental to understanding why we have to focus on offering exceptional customer service.
1. The Customer pays my wages
2. The long-term growth of the company depends on the long-term development of customer relationships
3. People trade with people
4. The customer is after an easy life (and so am I !)
The customer pays my wages. Yes of course we all know it, but it is nevertheless a fundamentally important part of why exceptional customer service is important. Without customers we have no business, and consequently no job. When I am running in-house customer service training with groups in the UK I get them to turn this into a visual image by telling me what we would notice if we had no customers at all from today, and we met up outside this building in 6 months time. The tell me about the boarded up ground floor windows, the rusty padlock on the front gates and the gentle breeze blowing through the weeds in the empty car park. Evocative stuff! Our business solely depends on customers. It doesn't matter how hard you work, how much your boss likes you, how long you've worked there, if there are no customers (or too few customers) the decision about employing you ultimately gets taken out of your manager or director's hands.
The long-term growth of the company depends on the long-term development of customer relationships. First consider why an organization has to grow. There are 2 key reasons. One is the declining value of money. Generally money decreases in value. So if an organization is happy to make £10million profit, year on year they are actually going backwards. Clearly £10million was a lot of money 10 years ago, now it won't even buy you a premier league footballer ! Second organizations have to aim to grow, because if they don't somebody else will at their expense. In competitive marketplaces it is the law of the jungle, kill or be killed - that's the way it is. Standing still is not an option.
In order to grow then we have 2 options : we either keep the customers we already have, or we find new ones and don't worry about losing the ones we've got. But a bit of common sense needs to come into play here, and you don't need to be a seasoned business person to grasp the concept. The obvious thing to do surely is try to hang on to all the customers you've already got, and find new ones. When running in-house and open courses for customer service training I use the analogy of a bucket to demonstrate this principle. Imagine the scene : I present you with a bucket and ask you to leave the room, fill it up with water and bring it back to me full. Easy enough, and you also think "what the heck's this got to do with building customer loyalty ?" You then notice that the bucket has got a hole in the bottom. OK, well you probably wouldn't need me to tell you that in order to fill the bucket with water, you should start by sealing the hole. It is just obvious. It's the same with running a customer base - your bucket. Yes you might focus all your energies on putting water in at the top, but it's making it hard work if some, most or all of it is leaking out the bottom. So seal the hole and build customer loyalty. Then, on customer service training courses we go on to talk about loyalty schemes that the major retailers run being a good example. But I can tell you're beginning to fade in reading this, so I'll move on !
People trade with people. It is still true that most buying and selling is done between 2 people. If you as a customer like a person you are dealing with, you are much more likely to want to buy from them. Conversely, if you don't like them, you will go out of your way not to deal with them. According to Lawrence Leyton 80% of people who change suppliers do it because of a break down in the relationship between the customer and supplier. That's incredible. So that's not the pricing, a change in quality, late delivery, it's because of how we're handled.
The customer is after an easy life (and so am I !) It is important to state that these 2 things are inextricably linked. If you make life easy for your customers, they will generally make things easy for you. Mostly they do not go out of their way to make your life a misery (ok so there might be a few exceptions). Generally customers only get agitated or angry, or upset because of something you or your organization has done or not done. Ideally the customer wants the minimum involvement with you. This is particularly true in business to business markets. They don't want to have to chase you, to keep phoning, to send e-mails. They just want things to happen quickly, accurately and without much involvement or effort on their part.
So offering exceptional customer service is easy really. It does take some involvement and effort on your part though. The prize for those who achieve this is big.
