How important is customer service to you?
18-Feb-2010
Social Media means you
need to get your act together.
With social media your customers now have the means to tell the world about
their experience of doing business with you. The service and support you
provide will be commented on – the only question is - what will they be saying
about your brand? Are you listening and responding to what they are
saying?
Sweat the small stuff.
Everything counts. Everything you do either builds up your brand, or
tears it down in your customer’s eyes. Ideally, every experience your
customers have with your brand is of a consistently high standard. Great
service delivery systems combined with well-selected, well-trained, and
well-managed people at the coalface is management job #1.
Be Proactive.
Delighting a customer by overcompensating after a problem has occurred is an
opportunity to create an advocate for life. However, making angry people
happy again is not something that you want to plan your business success
on. Prevention is definitely better than cure. So is
regularly surveying your customers and asking questions like, “What is the most
important improvement you’d like to see to make our company better in the
future?”
Empower your people.
You need to empower your front line people to respond to customer issues and
make good decisions in line with your company Core Values. If every
“tough situation” results in the issue being forwarded to someone “in
authority” to deal with, you’re going to eat into profits and have even more
frustrated customers.
Make “Head of customer
service” one of your key leadership team roles.
Think of customer service as a critical feature of your product or service
offering - not something you "have to do" after the sale to keep customers
satisfied. Who is head of customer service in your company, and how is
their success measured?
Customer service is
everyone’s job.
Too often customer service is left to front line employees. Get the
members of your leadership team to each call 1 customer every week as one of
their Key Performance Indicators - to ask how things are going and report their
findings back to the team. It’s a great way to delight and surprise your
customers, as well as keep in touch with what is really going on in your
company.
It’s about the
money!
Customer service is not just about being kind and helpful to your customers
(even though that is vitally important). If you calculate the average
lifetime value of a customer, you can begin to appreciate how the service and
support you offer to your customers directly relates to amount of money and
word of mouth referrals you receive. Customer service is not a cost
center, it should be a profit center.
Stephen Lynch
Chief Operating Officer - Global Operations
RESULTS.com
No longer the only question...
CEO's, Managers and Marketers ask 'How do I listen?', 'How do I know about what customers are saying?'
So then you need to know how to measure, what tools to use, and how to set up your company with Social Media in a way that will be strategic & effective.