How to get your employees to give outstanding customer service – should you be putting them first?

My Sunday Morning Blog

I like to believe that I am a champion of customer service excellence. My passion for quality, care in our interactions with others and a determination to succeed drives everything in my life.  It is pivotal to running my business, my relationship with my team, my clients, my delegates, my coachees, contacts, and suppliers. It seeps into my personal life, and infects, positively, I hope, my family, my kids and my friends.

So you can imagine how disappointed I constantly feel as a customer of organisations in this country when I experience a shocking lack of customer care let alone service excellence.  From the waiters of the newly opened restaurant not far from here, to the bored receptionist, the inept call centre agent,  the disinterested ‘not my job’ council officer  to the hotel staff who are taught to say ‘Good morning’ but not how to say sorry when something goes wrong.  Perhaps I am not typically British – I will give feedback, and I will complain.  My kids – not yet worn down enough as customers – whisper “Mum, don’t start!”

For more than 20 years I have been working with client organisations to help them stand out, to differentiate their services, by paying more attention to the personal side of service, and not just the material side – an obsession with their products, services and shareholder value. 

So I understand only too well that to align a collection of individuals and to motivate them all to want to deliver outstanding service is a huge challenge, but it is not impossible.  I feel the need to blog another day on some of the reasons that contribute to the challenge.  And perhaps in another blog I will share with you my experiences when I have been wowed by amazing service, and I have become an advocate and loyal customer.   But most of the time I am disappointed and disillusioned, and find myself comparing service here unfavourably with our European and other counterparts.

Is it not strange that, given the ongoing challenging environment in which we all work at the moment, those responsible for strategy and performance in organisations rarely have customer service excellence on their agendas?  Don’t they feel the need not just for satisfied customers, but for loyal ones, who will champion and advocate for them? Don’t they understand the power of turning round complainants and the subsequent increase in their repurchase intention?

I have been inspired today of all days to write this blog, by The Andrew Davidson interview with Vineet Nayar (IT giant HCL), in ‘The Sunday Times’.  His philosophy of ‘Employee First, Customer Second’ is that any firm priding itself on quality and creativity must put employee satisfaction first. Bosses “must assist and enable, not dictate, and companies will see maximum benefit from a happier, more productive workforce”.  The ‘value zone’, as he calls it, is in the ‘interface between employee and customer’.

The article resonated with me because for twenty years some of the key advice we have given our clients to help their reputation for customer service stand head and shoulders above the rest has centred around:

Think of the customer as someone you need, not who needs you

Customer Service Excellence – build it in at strategic level

Select the right people – are you building customer service attitudes and skills appropriately into your person specifications – for all posts.  How are you testing this?

Transform your organisational culture into one which truly values and nurtures its employees

Walk the talk.  As leaders and managers, role model the right behaviours and attitudes, as they will infect the staff

Don’t treat your staff as though they don’t count.  Remember, we humans pass on treatment.

 Empower your staff.  Inspire and motivate them.  Learn from them.

Ensure your procedures and policies are there to help the customers and staff, not hinder them.  Nor should they be there for organisational comfort

How much front-line ownership is there?  Staff must be able and willing, without fear of recrimination, to respond effectively to customer needs

Train, support, praise, reinforce, monitor, and feed back

Job satisfaction leads to excellent customer care which leads to job satisfaction

Finally, please remember – keep working at it – one run round the block won’t make you fit. – regular exercise will do! It’s a constantly moving horizon – so continually develop, revisit, reinvent and improve.

You can follow me on twitter as I share my day to day customer care experiences.  I would be interested in hearing yours, too.

Sunday morning blog – 09 May 2010 Blog Number 1

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