How do you audit your customer service? Do you receive a lot of complaints or very few? This article will provide you with ways to create and measure high definition customer service so that you can stay competitive in the marketplace. Whether you're an executive, a manager or a team leader, the following information will be beneficial to you.
That's a great picture on your new HD television, isn't it? The images are sharp and crisp and the colors so vivid. It's grand to kick back and watch a sporting event when you feel as if you are in the middle of the game or on the golf course. But wait. Why is the screen breaking up and going dark? Somebody DO something - before we see only a test pattern and a "technical difficulties" message!
Most of us give no thought to the parts responsible for that beautiful TV image until something goes wrong. Then disbelief and disappointment set in and sometimes we get an education we never dreamed we would need, with a vocabulary revolving around such things as resolution and pixels, those tiny dots that make up an image.
Customer service in our companies can fail in just the same way: Business seems to be humming along. You've told workers that customer service is your number one goal, and you hung the plaque on the wall in your office. Complaints are non-existent, and the financial reports are good. No news is good news, right?
Companies gladly accept traditional marks that they are doing well - such measures as few complaints and customer retention. But sustaining the big picture requires more than happy numbers. There's competition out there for whatever you do, and it's trolling for your customers. If you want to keep customers happy and your company healthy, you must nurture and maintain the individual attitudes that form employee behaviors, starting with top management.
Think of your customer service as a picture made up of thousands of tiny dots, or pixels. These combine and align to form a complete, brilliant image that pleases the eye. But if part of them malfunction, the picture might blur or break up in areas. It might even disappear completely, collapsing into a muddy smudge.
The first step in creating crisp, vivid customer service is developing a framework that describes the behavior surrounding customer service excellence. This includes getting down to the nitty-gritty of actions we expect from employees, such as urging customers to ask numerous questions, training workers how to develop rapport with their clients, or instructing employees to take the time to understand what a customer needs.
This framework must show how a company's desired behaviors align to its business goals, thus illustrating the bigger picture of what you are trying to achieve, and showing how these practices compare to those of other companies. Do your practices depart from industry standards? This could be problematic - or it could be just fine if your service behavior encourages excellence and supports corporate goals. Either way, it's good see how you are doing in the broad scheme of things and note "why we do it this way" if you differ from national norms.
The next step in your customer service plan is an internal behavior audit. You need to measure attitudes toward the specific behaviors in your framework so you will know if workers are with you or not. Do they believe in the importance of following up with customers to see if they are satisfied with the service they received? Do they think good customer service includes telling a customer why he or she is wrong?
Once you have the numbers in front of you, it's time to mend the gaps in places where behaviors have broken down. Think of it as fine-tuning of individual employees or perhaps a whole department, if you discover a large percentage of staff with behaviors/attitudes outside the zone of acceptable customer service. If you think of your framework in broad terms, it will help you hire the right people by exploring the attitudes of job candidates to ensure their beliefs about customer service mirror the company's.
Finally, remember that almost nothing thrives on neglect. The companies that perform the best measure often. They regularly "fine-tune" their image through training in areas where the picture is blurry. Through regular maintenance, they can kick back and watch the show without fear of technical difficulties or a distorted picture.
Author Resource:-
Jim Sirbasku is co-founder and CEO of Profiles International, a leading provider of human resource management solutions and employment assessments for businesses worldwide. For more information about how you can improve customer service, visit our website.
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