Charter UK believes that delivering great customer service can be distilled into 10 key steps:
1. Identify your customers.
Working out who your customers are can be even more important than knowing how to interact with them. Even with the internet, tracking customers and their buying habits is a huge challenge.
Effective customer intelligence is based on four key questions:
- Who are our chosen customers?
- What do they need and expect from us as a service provider?
- How well are we meeting their needs?
- How are we going to keep them as customers?
2. Believe in your front line customer service staff.
It is people who deliver great service, not companies. Nothing annoys a customer more than a call centre agent who is inflexible, dependent on a prepared script and incapable of acting independently. Companies should empower their customer service agents to think for themselves.
3. Understand how customers think.
Firms should consider how they can test the emotional elements of customer experience. Enterprise feedback management – proactively and dynamically surveying customers after a service issue – enables companies to resolve issues before the relationship breaks down.
4. Work for and with people who take pride in service excellence.
If the people at the top of an organisation don't believe in service excellence, it won't happen. Customer service has to be an issue that the board takes seriously – if not, no amount of money will give you a decent customer service operation.
5. Master the art of organisation design.
Service excellence is a function of how the organisation is designed. Leader responsibilities and management processes are crucial, especially in customer complaints. How are complaints handled? And are they made a priority?
6. Make the link to the bottom line.
Customers will remain loyal and recommend your company to others if they have a great customer experience. Also, customers who complain can become advocates for your brand – as long as the complaint is resolve quickly and satisfactorily.
7. Make everything a little better every day.
Leaders in service excellence train their people to drive continuous improvement. Being static or complacent will inevitably lead to falling behind the competition.
8. Understand that the future will be different.
Technology is changing the way service is delivered all the time. Failing to grasp these opportunities and threats will mean failure. Social media is changing the landscape significantly.
9. Learn from your mistakes.
Everybody makes mistakes – winners learn from them. You need to be willing to change and develop your customer service strategy based on customer feedback and market conditions.
10. Make things easier for customers.
Your customers want it to be easy to buy from you and deal with your customer service staff. Customer patience is limited, but for those companies that get it right the prizes are immense.
