Turn Your Employees Into Customer Service
Dynamos
Deliver outstanding service from the inside out...
Businesses have been trying for decades to import
good service practices and graft them into their own work settings. They use
training programs or other means to try and "regimentalize" key service
behaviors-an outside-in approach that seldom makes things any better, and
often only makes things worse.
Truly customer-focused businesses deliver outstanding service from the
inside out. The key is to get employees coming up with their own ideas for
delighting customers, and then letting positive feedback from happy
customers motivate the workers to continue implementing more of their own
innovative service strategies. This is the Flashpoint Effect, where employee
motivation and customer satisfaction fuel each other in a chain reaction of
contagious enthusiasm.
Easier said than done, of course - unless the organization has an actual
process in place to keep the chain reaction bubbling. Such a process does
not have to be complicated. Follow these three guiding principles to help
your employees generate their own ideas for improving the customer
experience, and watch how quickly these service enhancements give your
business a powerful competitive edge.
First Customer Focus Principle: Exceed the customer’s expectations every
step of the way. Shoppers at Ireland’s Superquinn supermarkets experience
the wow-factor at every turn. When they first arrive, they encounter a
supervised play area for young children. In the aisles they encounter a
multitude of signs encouraging them to report "goofs" (such as fruit that
has over-ripened), in return for which they’re given free lottery cards.
They discover bags of free vegetables they can bring home for their pets
("Make Your Hoppy Happy"). At checkout the store provides umbrellas to keep
shoppers dry while they watch attendants transfer their grocery bags from
cart to car.
Set up a brainstorming session in which your employees break a typical
customer transaction down into its individual steps, and then challenge the
group to focus on each step one at a time, and to uncover ways to add a
wow-factor element of delight in each step. They’ll probably come up with
more ideas than you can implement, but afterwards let them choose the best
ones, and help them implement these ideas successfully.
Second Customer Focus Principle: Make the customer feel important. It’s just
common sense, right? Maybe - but it’s certainly not common practice. Ever
see the sign that says In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash? Or the cartoon
of the four little men rolling on the floor with laughter, over the caption
You Want It When? Everywhere you look, you see businesses making it
painfully obvious that they consider their customers unreasonable intruders,
potential criminals, annoying interruptions of the "real work" the business
is trying to get done.
In your employee brainstorming session, get the group thinking about ways to
make customers feel welcome and appreciated in each step of the transaction.
The ideas that emerge often cost nothing to implement (like smiling more, or
addressing customers by name), and yet these are the little things that can
make such a big difference from the customers’ point of view.
Third Customer Focus Principle: Tailor the experience to fit the customer.
Where one supermarket invests in metal barricades to prevent the theft of
shopping carts, its customer-focused competitor chooses instead to invest in
carts that are even more appealing. Mothers with infants can use carts
outfitted with a baby seat. Shoppers with older children can use a cart
designed like a toy car, so the kids can pretend they’re driving while the
parent proceeds along the aisles. There are even self-powered sit-down carts
for the elderly and the disabled.
Flashpoint businesses recognize they deal with different categories of
customers, and each category can have unique expectations. These businesses
abandon the one-size-fits-all mentality, and look for ways to provide
something special for each major customer category.
Invite your brainstorming employees to list the major customer categories in
your business, and to come up with ways to wow each category individually.
These are often the kinds of “personal touch” ideas that deliver the biggest
impact. Even customers from different categories will be impressed with the
efforts your business is making to improve the overall customer experience.
Try applying these three principles in a brainstorming session with your own
employees, and discover for yourself how creating a customer service culture
from the inside out really can be as easy as one-two-three.
Copyright Paul Levesque
About the Author