I agree with John Spence, in his book “Awesomely Simple,” that in a world of nearly limitless product options and highly educated consumers with instant access to price, features, and benefits of almost every product, delivering consistently superior customer service is the only differentiator left for creating loyal and engaged customers.
Here are the top ten suggestions from John and others for how to create a culture of extreme customer focus in your organization:
- Create a customer service vision. Much like creating a vision statement to direct the organization, you should also create a clear and compelling “customer service vision” that describes the level of service your organization aspires to deliver.
- Exceed customer expectations. Show a relentless commitment to exceeding, not just meeting, expectations. Customers can’t tell you how to exceed their expectations, but they know it when they see it, they remember, and they tell their friends.
- Continuous customer service innovation. Many companies have an ongoing product innovation focus, but rarely think about customer service innovations. Define specific innovation objectives and rewards for improving the customer experience, such as deploying Astea's field service management.
- Create superior customer value. Focus on creating superior value for your customers, and they will love you. This means know your competitors, technologies, and alternatives available. Match your offerings to your target customers better than anyone else.
- Own the “voice of the customer”. The only critic whose opinion counts is the customer. Create strong, trusting relationships with your customers. Solicit feedback, communicate that feedback to the entire organization, and then be sure to take action on the feedback.
- Be the expert on delivering superior customer service. Find out everything you can about how to deliver great customer service. Steal the best ideas, benchmark against the top performers, and make improving customer service a core competency.
- Train every employee to be a customer service champion. Empower employees with the tools, training, equipment and support they must have to deliver excellent service consistently. Reward and praise those who deliver, and deal quickly with any employee who does not embrace the service values.
- Destroy barriers to delivering superior service. Look at all systems, policies, procedures, reports and rules. Wipe out anything that creates roadblocks or frustrations in the effort to delight and amaze the customer. Stupid rules that make it hard for employees to serve superbly can kill your business.
- Measure, measure, and communicate. Create a clear, specific, well-thought-out and over-communicated program for systematically collecting and communicating the most important customer service delivery measurements to the people who can then act on them. Make it easy for your people to win.
- Walk the talk. Every level of the organization, starting at the very top, must be a living example of your service strategy. If you do not deliver excellent service to your internal customers—promptly returning phone calls, showing up on time for meetings, and acting professionally—there is no hope that your front-line people will deliver great service.
Marty Zwilling
Disclosure: This blog entry was sponsored by Astea and I received compensation for my time, but the views expressed here are solely mine.
I love how you've included references to empowering employees and giving them the tools they need to give great customer service. I remember once in a previous company that three people needed to be involved in a simple refund: someone to give security clearance, someone to dig credit card information out of the system, and someone to interface with the customer. Talk about inefficient! I'm happy to say that we did streamline the process, so customers didn't have to sit on the phone and wait while we corral the troops!
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ReplyDeleteMost of the 10 ways you listed depend directly on the effectiveness of internal customer service. Most companies ignore this factor which renders external customer service futile. Having taught customer relations for 10 years at a local community college, creating customer service training for dozens of organizations, plus working with customers in several environments, I am convinces that without a solid internal customer service infrastructure and strong leadership, all external customer service fails. -- Ron Tillotson --resultswriting@aol.com
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