Are you losing customers? Or are your captive clients complaining about your service?
Do your staff recognise that the customer is the person who pays the salaries?
Everyone has a favourite story about poor service. Today we as customers are more demanding than ever before. And in most industries your customers are spoilt for choice and will move on to another supplier if you don't deliver the product quality or service they expect. If you are an internal service provider, your clients may complain so much about your service that you may begin to wish they would find someone else.
You can learn to serve successfully
Customer service shouldn't be so difficult. If you have the technical skills, serving should be easy and fun. Of course you and your clients would find your work far more rewarding if you both knew what they expected and you delivered against these expectations. And you would find it more exciting if you received positive feedback from the people you served.
But how do you actually do this?
Do you know what your clients expect? Customer service remains vague and easy to dismiss unless we stop to consider exactly what we expect as customers and what our customers expect. Then we need to translate these expectations into specific processes or deliverables.
What are the customer service ideas you MUST address?
There are some key things we need to get right in this. Your best option is to understand the demands customers are making of those from whom they are buying products and services. It is good to understand these requirements but it is not enough. As a provider of products and services you also need formulate and implement concrete plans to address each of the core requirements.
Are you ready to act with intent on your need to serve?
We have a great intervention for customer service. In 2002 we created a customer service course which we ran to great effect. As a facilitator and coach I prefer now to address these issues as structured interventions where delegates create concrete actions plans, rather than in training courses. The work is based on an excellent book written by Kelly Mooney, called "The Ten Demandments", about the ten core demands we, as the modern customers make. These demands have been defined for a commercial environment and we have translated these into the demands made by 'clients' of internally provided services. The workshop assists the team to zero in on the areas they need to address most and to define actions to address these areas.