Providing World-Class Customer Service

Whether we admit it or not, all firms are compared to companies like the Ritz Carlton, Walt Disney and Federal Express. These organizations and others continually set and raise the performance bar for customer service.

Do you “wow” your customers every time they deal with you?

Customer retention is vital to the growth of any business and customer retention is based upon positive experiences with your company. So how do you manufacture these positive experiences with your customers and use them to grow even beyond what retention brings? The answer to that is the successful implementation of Customer Touch Strategies.

Customer Touch is the systematic events your company does when interacting with customers. They are the thousands of little things you do that make dealing with your company different from any other company.

They include all points where your company touches the customer: anything the customer hears, sees, feels, reads, smells or touches. They include your lobby, the coffee you serve, your marketing materials, phone conversations, e-mails, product displays, sales people’s appearances, etc. Customer satisfactions are derived from the outcomes and the process of dealing with your company.

In Customer Touch Strategies, the key to realizing the complete lifetime value of a customer is to enhance the experiences between your company and the customer through a customer development process that turns customers into advocates for you. Only by maximizing your customer experiences will your company achieve World-Class Customer Service.

Moments of Truth

How do you manufacture Advocate Customers? The answer to that question comes by answering another question. Why do customers leave? The answer for 68 percent of companies is “Perceived Indifference.” They don’t feel that they are important or treated the way they expect to be treated. Therefore, to manufacture advocates you need to wow them! Focus on the business activities that directly touch good customers.

These are Moments of Truth. Use them to exceed their expectations, differentiate your company, reaffirm why they buy from you and make the customer feel important. The problem is that you do not know the standards or expectations that you must meet. Your customer’s expectations for quality customer service may be set based on their experience with other industries or businesses. Your challenge is two-fold:

• You must understand the expectations of the customers
• You must manage and balance those expectations against what you can deliver.

To make matters worse, each customer has different expectations and those expectations are changing all the time. If your strategy is to be the low cost provider, you only need to meet minimum expectations.

If you want to differentiate yourself as a premium provider you must exceed expectations. To do that, you must first know what your customers like and dislike in dealing with you and what their expectations are for customer service.

• Invite complaints
• Interview front-line, customer-facing personnel
• Interview lost customers
• Interview lost prospect customers
• Use customer advisory boards
• Listen to comments in social networks
• Survey customers with blank spaces for writing comments
• Ask for testimonials indicating what you did to exceed expectations

Once you understand the Customer Expectation gap, you can work on closing it.

The marketing objective here is to develop a way of doing business that retains customers and provides so high or unexpected value that a prospective customer will leave a modestly satisfactory relationship with another company to get it.

Commitment to world-class customer service and Customer Touch Strategies starts at the top of the company but must penetrate to every team member. You must examine and control each of the customer touch points. To the extent possible, they must be controlled to facilitate and enhance the customer’s experience in working with your company. Where to start is as individual as your company is to the next one. Here are some ideas to help.

• Let your team know what you are seeking to achieve and reinforce this as often as possible.
• Get the team members in your company involved in establishing performance standards for customer experiences. One idea is to draft a Customer Bill of Rights.
• Make Customer touch issues a regular part of your internal meetings and management discussions.
• Make it easy for customers to complain and communicate with real people in your company. Let customers see how their issues will be addressed and track progress. Give them a sense of control.
• Interview front-line, customer-facing personnel looking for ways to exceed expectations. Get them involved and brought into the importance of the Customer Touch initiatives.
• Use Customer Advisory Boards to regularly enhance your service quality.
• Develop social networking groups to listen to customers talk amongst themselves.
• Interview lost customers to discover the little things that irritated them and for the processes that could be improved upon.
• Develop a system for rewarding and empowering team members to deliver outstanding customer service above all other performance criteria.
• Use customer surveys and website forms with blank spaces encouraging customers to write comments.
• Ask for testimonials indicating what you did to exceed expectations.
• Develop training programs on customer care
• Use systems and processes to deliver consistent service. For example, use scripting procedures for anyone who answers a customer phone call. But be flexible, empower your team members to do what they need to do to exceed expectations.
• Review all “deliverables” to the customer to ensure that they are needs based and “wow” customers. This includes all forms of communications such as fax sheets, e-mail templates, product packaging, instruction materials, etc.
• Look at your lobby, meeting rooms, dress-code policy, delivery trucks...anything a customer may see, feel, touch, smell, or hear. Do they impress the customer from the customer’s perspective? Does it add a positive impression?
• Look at your marketing materials, sales presentations, advertisements, etc. Do they help build the positive impression?
• Billing – is it a necessary evil or can your customers easily relate benefits to costs? Is it convenient to the customer or to your company?
• Look at everything your customer will experience in dealing with you. Make every point a positive one no matter how small. As the old adage says, “It’s better to do 1,000 things one percent better than everyone else than it is to do one thing 1,000 percent better.” Eventually, your competition will see the one thing you did and copy you. It is, however, very difficult to see and copy 1,000 things.

Many companies, in an effort to keep costs down, spend minimally in customer service. The problem is that the cost of high quality customer service is tangible, but the cost of going the extra mile is intangible. What you can’t see doesn’t hurt, right? Wrong. While profitability is the consequence of high productivity and cost containment, real gains in profit growth over time is only achieved by focusing on attracting and retaining customers.

By working ON your business, growth almost becomes inevitable. The opportunity for Customer Touch Strategies exists in every company. Look carefully. If you like to take your business to the Next Level, we can help. Give us a call.

What You Will Need:

• Losing too many customers should draw the attention of those individuals in top management, sales, customer service and in marketing functions. Make sure to allocate time to work on the issues.
• You will need hard data on customers, purchases, products/services, etc.
• You will need a strong champion to in top management to make sure the initiatives get the support they need and to ensure the latest crisis doesn’t distract the company or that it returns to the status quo.
• You will need patience. Getting the answers to why customers are leaving and reversing this trend won’t happen over night.

In their book, A Passion for Excellence, authors Tom Peters and Nancy Austin outline 22 characteristics of a customer-centric business. We think these are a good start. We are sure that you will come up with more.

• Company bulletins and all other forms of printed matter feature stories about working with customers.
• Unique respect for salespeople is demonstrated. When a salesperson talks, others in the company jump.
• Customer support people are showered with attention. Excessive training aimed at receptionists and others on the front lines in the customer service delivery effort.
• The importance of customer pervade in every function of the company. The customer is alive. The indirect support team members are required (not just encouraged) to go on sales and service calls, serve on joint company/customer problem-solving teams and otherwise engage in regular, result-oriented customer activities.
• There is a special (and friendly/respectful) language associated with customers.
• Reviews and reports of all kinds have a disproportionate share of their content aimed at customers and revenue-enhancement activities.
• Visits with customers are exchanged regularly, at all levels in the company and the customer organizations.
• Hallways, discussions, celebrations of heroes — minor and major — overwhelmingly focus on support for the customer.
• Devices abound for customer listening.
• Devices exist to ensure that connections are made (and then acted upon) between sales and others in the company.
• Customer satisfaction is measured frequently.
• Complaint response mechanism is excessively focused on immediate and personalized responses.
• Promises to customers are kept, period, regardless of cost. Delivery dates are met.
• Time spent by senior management with customers is never less than 30% of all available time.
• Quality and reliability of services is an obsession throughout the company.
• Every part of the company actively looks for ways to differentiate the company or its products/services.
• Operations people are deeply involved in customer activities.
• The customer’s perception is most important whether it is realistic or not.
• The corporate philosophy specifically deals with “how to treat customers.”
• Management spends time in all functional areas doing work.
• Management spends effort to reduce the bureaucratic barriers that interfere with customer contact.
• Every department has a passion for tiny customer-related improvements.

The process of growing your business mandates that you continually improve your knowledge, skills and experience. The following list of resources is by no means all inclusive of what you need but do represent resources that have helped our firm get to the Next Level.

Related Articles:

• I'm Losing Customers. What Can I do?
• What to Do With Hotel Soap
• Lifetime Value Cycle
• Barriers to Customer Touch Excellence

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