Guidelines for Superior Customer Service

If you are serious about creating a superior customer service experience that distinguishes your brand--whether your product or service is delivered by phone, through the Internet, or in person – follow the key customer service guidelines that have brought success to leading companies, according to Warner B. Wims, Ph.D. President of WBW & Associates.

Recognize that the goal is to help everyone to be a service leader. Create leaders up, down, and across the organization that make customer service a continuous unrelenting mantra, while fostering a healthy work environment. Listen to and act upon employee suggestions to eliminate barriers to superior customer service. Ensure that customer service appears frequently on meeting agendas. Organizations that excel at customer service consistently implement these ideas, and more. Here are a few key guidelines:

Hire correctly in the first place
It is much easier to hire genuinely courteous, intuitively attentive people who remain calm, caring and maintain attention to detail under stress, than to try to train someone to be that way. Test current employees, using realistic simulations, and train those who have potential for outstanding service skills.

Treat employees the way you want them to treat customers
“Model and they will follow.” Involve employees in coming up with ideas for service improvement.

Set specific customer service performance standards
Help employees to see how “little things” matter and how their execution of customer service ties into the big picture. Make sure there are service goals and standards that are meaningful to each level of the organization and each job.

Emphasize how providing excellent service benefits employees
Providing a good customer experience is not only good for the customers, but makes the employee’s experience a better one as well.

Emphasize payback to the business
Be sure employees understand how the experience of excellent customer service makes all of your products and services appear more attractive and superior.

Urge employees to put the customer’s interests first
Put the customer’s interests and wellbeing first, and the impact on the company second. In other words, sacrificing short-term losses for long-term gain is appropriate if service excellence is also achieved.

Measure and reward service excellence
Track and reward service excellence with the same discipline and emphasis that you track and reward sales success: service and sales are two sides of the same coin. Create a customer service communication process. Establish an easy, simple process for both employees and customers to discuss concerns and/or move problems or dissatisfactions to a higher level in the organization.

Support internal service feedback
Provide employees with a safe process for giving feedback to each other about customer service performance.

Institute a non-threatening process for tracking good and bad customer experiences
Create an environment of open communication where employees and customers can share concerns and opportunities fearlessly. Survey customer and employee satisfaction, produce actionable data, and seek recommendations. Measure customer experience from the customer’s point of view — not only yours. Repeat what is good and uncover the root cause of the bad.

Involve your Board of Directors
Involve your board of directors in keeping your organization accountable to customers.

Match the service experience to the offering
Different offerings require different kinds of customer service. The more personal or individualized the product or service, for example, the more personal and individualized the experience should be for the customer.

Strive to sustain established personal relationships
Customers are often comforted by established relationships, particularly if they have bonded with certain providers. These relationships are hurt by employee absenteeism and turnover, and may result in customer dissatisfaction.

Create a sense of intimacy
Small is sometimes better. Customer relationships often thrive when you create a sense of intimacy. Even in a large facility, explore how it can be made to feel more intimate and welcoming.  Continue to update your facilities, integrating technology to give customers personal access to information and to entertain and engage them on a personal level.

Show your best customers that you value their business
Create the processes needed to reward repeat customer loyalty and provide them with increasingly tailored levels of service excellence.

Give customers the option for control
Some customers will thrive when allowed to manage their own account or services, including online services.

Automate for greater ease of use
Automated systems are often appropriate and desired if they are simple. Create a one-stop shop for services. Don’t send the customer down a long chain of connections.

Strive for excellence at all the contact points in the customer experience
Your customer’s first impression may be negative if there is trash in the parking lot (or “junk” on your website), or if there is an uninviting entrance to your facility (or your website home page is uninviting). The customer will also be turned off by prolonged wait (or download) times, difficulty getting to the right person (or information) quickly, and so forth. These are all critical touch points to refine.

Make sure that signage, or links, are a snap to follow
Remember that not all customers find it easy to follow directions. There may be times when repetition and redundancy are helpful. Test your signage and/or website links to be sure they are easy to use, and provide enough directions so that no customer will be left behind.

Use terms that are easily understood by customers
Telling a customer to go to “X-Ray” when the sign says “Radiology” is a good way to lose a customer. Telling someone to “reboot” his or her computer instead of “turn it off and on” may be baffling to the uninitiated. Be sure you use language that clearly informs, not unintentionally confuses, your customers.

Inventory customer “anxiety points”
Know the places that are particularly anxiety provoking for the customer and focus attention on reducing those stressors.

Research the specific drivers of customer satisfaction in your industry, product or service
What customers want, need, and expect will continue to evolve. Be sure you understand what needs are driving your particular niche, and how you must service customers to keep them loyal.

Continuously monitor capacity needs brought on by customer volume, and adjust quickly
“Just in time” inventory is fine, but not when it affects customer satisfaction. Be sure you understand your customer volume and are able to quickly adjust products and services accordingly.

Make sure services are integrated
Each component of your business may be providing good customer service, but if all the pieces don’t fit together well, the customer experience overall may be a fragmented, negative one. Teamwork is essential. Develop teams and use online workspaces that allow employees to collaborate from remote locations.

Reduce handoffs
Look for opportunities to say, “I will handle that for you” rather than handing the customer off to someone else or having them go off on their own. If you must hand off the customer to another associate, whether in person or on the telephone, stay with the customer until that action has occurred.

If you raise the service bar, do it organization-wide
As you make improvements in one unit or location of your business, you raise expectations on the part of the customer for the same high level of service everywhere. Rapidly transfer learning about good and bad service to points across the organization. Raise the bar for every unit of your organization and you will not risk customer disappointment if one unit or location does not meet their needs.

Make service excellence part of the culture
True customer service excellence is more than a slick marketing campaign. Back up your customer service pledge with reality — or risk losing the customer’s (and your employees’) belief in it forever. Make sure that service excellence to each customer is deeply embedded in your company culture.

Strive for authenticity
Many customers are irked by a practiced yet insincere, “Have a nice day” or, “How may I provide you with excellent service?” Learning specific scripts can help employees understand when some words and messages work best. However once these scripts are learned, like jazz musicians who learn the melody, allow employees to improvise.

Give employees the leverage to serve customers their own way
Believe in your people’s innate service abilities. Employees will often serve customers better when they are allowed to use their own discretion, initiative, and creativity.

Anticipate customer problems/desires
Don’t wait for a problem or a request before acting. Try to provide customers with what they need before they know they need it.

Respond to feelings as well as facts
People want to know you empathize and care about what they are going through. In certain settings (e.g., healthcare, personal loss situations) demonstrating emotional support is crucial. Customers are simply people who – like you - want to feel that their emotional needs are being addressed.

“Great service means always having to say you’re sorry”
An apology is critical for many customers if you have made an error or if they are facing a problem. Make mistakes a learning opportunity.

Recognize cultural differences
Be sure that employees understand the cultural and language differences within your customer base, so that incorrect assumptions by employees don’t negatively impact the quality of service provided.

Recognize generational preferences
Certain too-familiar terms like “Hon,” or calling someone by their first name instead of the proper titles Mr., Mrs., or Ms. can be very offensive to some generations. Other preferences can be found in certain regions of the country, or among specific customer groups. Treat customers with respect from their point of view. Always show deference by being more formal, rather than too casual.

Recognize that different customers have different needs
Determine what customers really want (speed of service, friendliness, information, etc.) and give it to them. Don’t assume you know what true needs lie behind a customer’s request; you may be incorrect.

Reduce wait times
No one likes to wait—unless they are being highly entertained! Honor customers’ valuable time by serving them quickly and efficiently.

Respond back to the customer’s issue until it is resolved
You may not yet have new information, but from the customer’s perspective, even knowing that there is no new information may be useful and very welcomed.

Keep customers informed
Tell people what is going on and why, whether it is regarding their health, their product order, their computer system, their flight, etc. Don’t leave customers in the dark.

Please contact WBW & Associates, LLC to discuss your situation and explore how we can be of help.