The quality of your focus on customer service determines the quality of your business success. There are a couple reasons for this:
- In a down economy, it’s more important than ever to really focus on retaining your existing customers. The statistics will vary from industry-to-industry, but it’s generally accepted that it costs about five times as much to bring a new customer into your business then it does to retain an existing one.
- There’s a lot of competition out there in just about every marketplace, and customers have two kinds of needs—personal needs and practical needs. The practical needs are the goods and services they need. But multiple companies can provide these goods and services, and probably for comparable prices. So what drives a customer to choose one provider over another is whether their personal needs are being met. The customer needs to feel they are getting value, that they are being listened to and that they are being respected in all their interactions with the company.
These two things drive the difference between a high-performing organization and organizations that are just scraping by.
Quality Customer Service Defined
There are two components of quality customer service:
- Follow the “Golden Rule” (Do to others as you want them to do to you)—We all want to feel listened to; we all want to feel valued; we all want to feel like our patronage means something to the company we’re buying from and that they value our business.
- Commit to creating a culture of customer service in your workplace—The second thing that really drives quality customer service is the behavior in your workplace while you’re creating a service-focused culture. You actually have to take the opposite tactic and say to yourself, “You know what? We don’t define what quality customer service is; our customers define our quality of customer service.” And in those situations, every organization will have a slightly different definition of what they consider quality customer service that’s based on what their customers’ expectations are.
The most important thing, however, is for high-performing organizations to really strive hard to define quality customer service for themselves by reaching out to their customers and finding out what their expectations are, and then shaping the company’s approach in order to meet that.
Steps to Improving Your Company’s Customer Service
There are a number of elements that play into improving your company’s customer service, such as:
- Create a service culture that’s part of, not only your company processes and procedures, but also a part of how you do business.
- Review your company’s mission, vision and values to ensure that they focus on customers and quality customer service.
Once you establish a customer-focused culture in your company, then you can work on improving the tactical parts of your service, which I will discuss in my next Insight.
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