Dear Entrepreneurs: Here is How to Achieve Customer Service Excellence

By Amina Faki,

Today’s customer experience requires a combination of individualized insights, connected interactions and an agile approach to meet customers in the channel of their choosing. This means more than simply doing the same things over in the new channels. It requires new ways of exploring customer trends and preferences.

With the economy still as unpredictable as ever, with major organizations going into administration every week, good customer service is more important now than it ever has been for companies not only to survive, but also thrive.

With this in mind, and with the business scene as competitive as ever, we’ve gone out and asked a number of our leading assessors for some top tips to help businesses achieve Customer Service Excellence

Below are some of the top tips written by Chris Tyrrell, Senior Assessor with standards organization Customer Service Excellence (CSE) and edited by Jamie Lawrence;

Core values

When companies identify, agree, and embed clear core values, staff start pulling together to achieve better delivery of all aspects of the business, including customer service. Staff and where possible, customers should be involved in agreeing the values

Broad Statement

Every customer would like a personalized, customized service, whereas the most cost-effective service delivery is ‘one size fits all’. Excellent customer satisfaction should be achieved when the provider strikes the right balance between the two

Excellent customer service may mean a premium can be charged for that service – but only up to a limit. The skill is knowing what that limit is

No organization can provide excellent customer service unless everybody, whatever their function and whatever their place in the hierarchy, recognizes they have customers, be they external – or internal

No organization can survive by treating its customers as a homogenous mass, you need to segment your customers in ways that make sense to you as the service provider and to them as the customer.

No organization really likes complaints – but they provide unsolicited customer feedback

An organization can learn from such feedback and improve its service delivery. By publishing the actions and service improvements it has taken as a result of complaints and comments, it can demonstrate it is a ‘listening and learning’ organization, and welcomes customer feedback

Channel Shift to online service provision, support, information and payment

Use your website to demonstrate your transparency as an organization by publishing your

• a. Core business standards and your performance against them
• b. Your standards for the timeliness and quality of response to customer contact, and your performance against them
• c. An explanation of any dips in performance, together with any remedial or preventive action you are taking
• d. Action you are taking in response to customer satisfaction surveys, comment cards, and complaints

Survey fatigue – the need to plan how you survey customers

Your analysis of customer segments should reveal how each segment would be preferred to be consulted, and how often!

It is not good practice for the person providing the service to supervise the filling out of a customer survey. This should be done by someone independent

If you’re regularly getting customer satisfaction ratings above 90 percent, then it may be lulling you into a false sense of security. Try focusing on raising the level of ‘very satisfied

Driven by the top management but embraced by all staff

Everybody and I mean everybody, in the organization should have a customer-focused key work objective/competence/behavior in their job description for recruitment and induction, and subsequent performance reviews

Management need to pro-actively recognize (and, if appropriate, reward) staff who suggest customer service improvements or who go beyond the call of customer service duty

Experiencing the customer journey. Every organization has its process path diagrams

Test out the actual customer journey – the process path may represent the theoretical customer journey but how do you test it in practice? It’s important to capture the customers’ experiences:

• a. Ask a group of customers to record their emotional highs and lows along their journey
• b. Alternatively, structure a customer survey to ask customers about their experiences and emotions along the journey
• c. As a last resort, ask staff who are not involved to mystery shop the customer journey
• d. Reducing unnecessary customer contact along their journey should be a key objective for any customer-focused organization. There are various ways of doing this – customer journey mapping (above) is one example. Good practice for call centers is to log each call as to whether it could have been avoided by e.g. accessing the web site
• e. Get managers to ‘work the talk’ – do a frontline job for a day or more

Delivering the service – at the office, in the customer’s home, or elsewhere

Always acknowledge the new customer, especially if you can’t deal with them immediately

Ensure that any private interview facilities are well publicized. Customer-facing staff should pro-actively recognize when this might be appropriate

Manage customer expectations – keep them informed about the progress of their enquiry, request for service, or complaint.

Benchmarking – Don’t rely on your own feedback and management information

Benchmark your core business performance against sector comparators

If you have Service Standards or a Customer Charter or Pledge always review on an annual basis that you actually delivered them and publicise the results to your customers. This will show your promises are genuine and deliverable and will stop them becoming cosmetic statements. As a result you will deliver excellence!