As a manager or team member, you probably have heard it before. Your boss walks in and sadly says "Sorry but we are going to have to cut your budget so stop all spending and give us the names of the people we need to let go." Then you start thinking about the lives that will be impacted. You may even have to let one of your friends go because times are tight. Alternatively, you may have been one of the people that was let go because the organization was not performing as well as everyone had hoped and people needed to go. It did not have to be that way. Worse yet, how do you improve the customer experience with a smaller and potentially demoralized workforce?
It is never easy
These economic times have impacted all of us. Many Businesses have had layoffs while performing admirably. Other business in the same marketspace have thrived. Finally, many organizations were performing mediocre at best and the economic downturn crushed them. Customer service excellence is not cheap, but mediocrity is even more costly. It will cost some poor performing organizations to cease operations. Employees have to be empowered to make decisions that benefit the customer.
Excellence takes effort
Companies that want to deliver excellent customer service have to invest the money, time, and emotional energy in driving customer satisfaction (Brown, 1990). It is not ok to allow customers to have "so-so" experiences in todays' world. Those customers will go next door and get the same product/service cheaper, faster, and better than you can do it. Good enough is not good enough. Managers have to be fanatical about delivering the best possible experiences to their customers. People will forget the price, but they will never forget poor quality or bad customer service. They will go out of their way to tell others how bad their experience was. They will tell scores of potential customers about your companies arrogance and hubris. I have personally watched hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential business evaporate solely as a result of our company's bad reputation. As an organizational leader, you to have ensure that your team knows your beliefs on this subject. You have to be unwavering and relentless in your pursuit of perfecting the customer experience. It has to be part of your organizations DNA. Take a look at the Ritz-Carlton service values. This is a company that is dead serious about delivering excellent service to their customers.
Are you a manager with team members that do not seem interested in delivering great service? How will you deal with that situation? Perhaps you are an employee and you work for a company that does not put the customer first. How does it make you feel when you have to field calls from disgruntled customers? What do you do to deliver excellence even if your organization doesn't? Please take a moment to comment below and let us know.
Check out some of these related articles on how to improve your teams customer service excellence.
How not to do customer service
Perhaps the reason employees aren't 100% dedicated to serving the customers first is because they themselves are disgruntled. The morale and workplace atmosphere has a huge effect on the output of one's performance. Employers should work on putting their employee first so that the employee can focus on the customer. Its a win-win situation.
ReplyDeleteInterbrands just released their Best Global Brands of 2011 list, and surprisingly luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Cartier, and Tiffany & Company made the top 100. Those brands reported that they too had been adversely affected by the economic downturn, but they focused on basics such as quality, craftsmanship, and their core customers. In return they were able to weather the storm, increase profits, and expand in the Asian markets.
ReplyDeleteI believe the key is to focus on the basics, such as customer service and the rest will follow.
source:http://www.portfolio.com/executive-style/2011/10/05/authenticity-and-craftsmanship-help-luxury-brands-rank-high-on-interbrand-scale
I worked with Phillip Crosby in the 1980s and graduated from his Quality College program. Phil was the Juran of the American aerospace industry, one of the fathers of modern quality process and measurement. His dogma was “do it right the first time” as a means of reaping the savings of high quality; savings in reduced rework, but higher savings in customer satisfaction. It is always less expensive to keep and resell to an existing customer than to acquire and sell to a new one. Yet so many businesses squander their customer base with poor service and little regard or understanding that the vein of new customers is never endless and often overly expensive to mine.
ReplyDelete