A lot has been written over the years about ‘Customer Service’ and exceeding your customer expectations. Companies glibly talk about a ‘World Class Service’ making the difference between success and failure. Yet when we, the customer, come to do business with them we perceive very little difference between the before and after ‘World Class Service’ Company. Well, that is perhaps not quite true, as the telephone system will now offer you even more chances of not talking to someone.

A good comedy series for Radio would be ‘Guess How You Do Business With this Organisation’. Contestants would be given a simple task to undertake and the viewer would sit back and watch the fun. Cruel? Not in the least because you probably come across so many examples of this when you try to conduct a simple transaction. Only the other day we heard this story from a delegate on our Customer Service course: “I was telephoned to be told I could collect my order from a well known department store ‘At any time’. As the store opens at 09.00 you would assume that this would be a suitable time. Wrong! The department I needed didn’t open until 10.00 which I didn’t discover until I arrived at 09.15!! I was told that ten years ago trade was quiet and so they decided to stagger departmental opening times to reduce costs.” You can be sure the delegate has already named and shamed this store to 15 other potential customers!

The reality is it should not be as difficult as that. There are some simple, common sense steps that can be followed which will enable a business to offer a top rate service, never mind ‘World Class’. Think of customer service like a chain of events which starts from the moment the customer considers doing business with you, the big C’s and in general terms they go something like this.

Convenience Are your full services available for the hours you trade? Overheard in a local stationers shop when responding to a lady bemoaning the unavailability of a lamination service on a Friday afternoon, ‘We can laminate up to five o’clock any day of the week except on a Friday when the man goes home at one o’clock and there is no one here who can work the machine’. To which the frustrated customer replied, ‘But when I have been discussing this with you earlier in the week, no one told me’. Well, they wouldn’t, would they as it is much more fun this way.

Cordiality Have a friendly greeting, a smile on the face and in the voice, even when things go wrong. A young waitress made a mistake putting through a customer’s food order which meant the main course would be 30 minutes late. Potential for a really dissatisfied customer here then! Nothing daunted she bit the bullet and explained the situation before the customer complained. The customer was so impressed by her honesty and this proactive approach that the she still received a £5.00 tip for being ‘So helpful about her mistake’. The Restaurant owner was gob-smacked! Remember, smile and the world smiles with you.

Consistency Look at the way you treat your customers. Are they all valued the same irrespective of transaction value? As Customer Service Director of a service business I gave this advice: ‘Do not undervalue today’s smaller customer because they have a habit of becoming tomorrow’s larger customer and then they will remember you and go elsewhere if they think you have pulled the wool over their eyes’. The smaller customer exhibits better loyalty and is less demanding than the larger one.

Communication It’s not what you say, but how you say it that’s important. Prior to conducting training for a well known Call Centre I listened in to the type of calls the operators handled. A customer called in to request an emergency delivery. Without hesitation the operator responded by saying ‘I am sorry you have missed the cut off.’ To which the customer responded with, ‘What cut off?’ One verbal cuffing later, the customer had their request granted but the operator felt they had lost. Why? Because they did not listen and seek further information about the customer’s problem and then think about how they might be able to help. Instead they offered the customer a challenge by suggesting they had ‘made the mistake by missing the cut off’. Most people will rise to a challenge.

Cost Is having a good relationship with your customer a cost which can be cut? If your customer feels comfortable you are going to get repeat business, loyalty and word of mouth recommendations all of which improves profitability. Good service is the creation of value. It is about the customers emotional experience of dealing with the organisation matching their perception of what it should be. If you want to save cost then invest in training which equips your people with the right skills (hard & soft) to do the job properly rather than wasting money on shoring up the cock-ups!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 10:57 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.