Achieving Award Winning Customer Service - Written by Gene Levine Associates

"We are thinking of forming a customer service department. Do you have any ideas that will help us focus our efforts?" — STB3, via the Internet

Customers are not limited to those who purchase your company’s products. They are everyone you serve, work for, work through or work with. In a larger sense, customers provide you with a job and a paycheck. Your customer service mentality should be an extension of this philosophy.

It can be safely said that everyone is or has a customer. Or, putting it another way, sometimes you’re the customer; other times people depend upon you. Everyone has or is a customer. Some customers are "internal" customers (anyone within your organization who at any given time is dependent upon you) others are "external" customers (anyone outside your organization who at any given time is dependent upon you).

You don’t just want satisfied customers – you want loyal customers. This is important because many companies (including your competitors) make similar products; it’s often the service that differentiates them. Hence, you have to surprise customers, which entails giving them better service than they expect. This approach goes against most traditional customer service paradigms, but as the saying goes, "if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got."

Overall, a company committed to award-winning customer service must be committed to change. At the forefront of this change is accepting the need for a company-wide training and development program where attitude, caring, attentiveness, a sense of urgency and courtesy are developed and ingrained. In other words, the focus must be on developing your employees, rather than installing flavor-of-the-month programs. If you take this approach, your employees will slowly but surely become an integral part of the new modus operandi and achieve amazing results.

Your company’s level of customer service is defined by your customers’ negative or positive mental perceptions of what happened during contact with your company. Their expectations of that experience and the degree of satisfaction they felt afterward will influence their opinions.

For instance, have you ever called a company, been placed on hold and then no one ever came back to assist you? Have you ever taken your car to the shop for service, had the mechanic tell you "your problem was solved," and shortly afterward the problem reoccurs? Or how about when you went to a store and were unable to find someone to help you? Ever been in a restaurant where the employees are more interested in each other than serving you, where you glass of water or coffee never gets refilled unless you ask? Well, that’s how your customers feel when you’ve disappointed them!

These expectations begin at the precise moment a customer first contacts you or any other person employed by your company. This is the pivotal time when you either fall short of or exceed this customer’s expectations – what I call the "Golden Moment."

At this point of contact it must be recognized that the customer — whether internal or external — is a person deserving of respect. So if you are ready to establish an award-winning customer service program, the simplest place to start is to focus on improving and perfecting the Golden Moment. No other experience in the company-customer relationship can have such a positive or negative effect on profits.

Since everyone in your company influences customers at one time or another, service must not be focused only within certain departments. A total company effort must expand customer service to include every employee. Exempt no one. Even though customer service representatives may be the primary link to outside customers, they need the support of everyone within the organization.

This approach represents a change from the traditional line and staff management pyramid - where the CEO is at the top and the workers are at the bottom. Consider the benchmark model proposed by Jan Carlzon, the former president of Scandinavian Airlines, in his book Moments of Truth. His approach turns the pyramid upside down, with top management working for the workers. In terms of customer service, this means that whenever customer contact is involved, regardless of the product, companies are in the people business, not the manufacturing business. This, in turn, dictates that strategies and programs always start and end with the people who actually do the work. Hence, the focus must be on developing employees so that service comes from their hearts, rather than from rote memory or procedures.

Customer service is more than a tool to drive sales. Award-winning customer service - accomplished through high-quality, properly trained employees - raises you above your competition. Keep in mind though, that when you raise that competitive bar, the quality of your employees must also go up. Having better employees is a win-win for all: for the employees, for the company and especially for the customers.

Here are some of the greatest tips and award winning ideas gleaned from those companies who have award winning customer service: . . .

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