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The economy still as unpredictable as ever. Major organisations across the UK going into administration every week. It makes good customer service even more important now than it ever has been for companies not only to survive, but also thrive.
With this in mind, Customer Service Excellence asked a number of its leading assessors for some top tips to help businesses achieve Customer Service Excellence. With the help of assessor, Chris Tyrrell, here is the next instalment, focusing on how to involve all of your staff.
1 – If you’re regularly getting customer satisfaction ratings above 90%, then it may be lulling you into a false sense of security. Try focusing on raising the level of ‘very satisfieds’.
2 – Everybody and I mean everybody, in the organisation should have a customer-focused key work objective/competence/behaviour in their job description for recruitment and induction, and subsequent performance reviews
3 – Again, all staff need to be encouraged to put forward their ideas for service improvement, especially newcomers who bring a new perspective, and management need to show how they’ve responded to these suggestions
4 – Management need to pro-actively recognise (and, if appropriate, reward) staff who suggest customer service improvements or who go beyond the call of customer service duty
5 – Senior Managers also need to demonstrate, on a regular basis, their personal commitment to excellent customer service
6 – Don’t hide compliments – they should be brought up at annual appraisal, but also publicised more widely to encourage other staff to put these forward – and challenge the British reticence of not blowing our own trumpet
7 – Test out the actual customer journey – the process path may represent the theoretical customer journey but how do you test it in practice? It’s important to capture the customers’ experiences:
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a. Ask a group of customers to record their emotional highs and lows along their journey
b. Alternatively, structure a customer survey to ask customers about their experiences and emotions along the journey
c. As a last resort, ask staff who are not involved to mystery shop the customer journey
d. Reducing unnecessary customer contact along their journey should be a key objective for any customer-focused organisation. There are various ways of doing this – customer journey mapping (above) is one example. Good practice for call centres is to log each call as to whether it could have been avoided by e.g. accessing the web site
e. Get managers to ‘work the talk’ – do a frontline job for a day or more
8 – Always acknowledge the new customer, especially if you can’t deal with them immediately
9 – Apologise for any un-due wait – don’t do it automatically, and please don’t give the customer an automatic ‘have a nice day’. Try and personalise it, within the organisation’s acceptable boundaries
10 – Ensure that any private interview facilities are well publicised. Customer-facing staff should pro actively recognise when this might be appropriate
Customer Service Excellence is a quality standard set up and trade marked by the Cabinet Office and is now operated under license by G4S Assessment Services, Centre for Assessment, emqc, and SGS UK. In order for your business to be recognised as achieving Customer Service Excellence, you must be successfully assessed against the Five Criteria of the Standard by one of the licensed certification bodies. For more information please visit http://www.customerserviceexcellence.uk.com