Top 7 Tips to Deliver Exceptional Customer Service Instead of Growing Your Competitor's Bottom Line

With the holiday season just beginning, businesses are scrambling to get more customers and show more sales. However, retail and business to business (B2B) research continues to suggest businesses are failing to deliver adequate to exceptional customer service. Poor customer service dramatically affects the bottom line of every organization. Hence, all that scrambling may be for naught.

The 2005 American Customer Satisfaction Index, a survey conducted by the University of Michigan, is at one of its lowest levels in the past 10 years. IBM survey of 2004 Christmas shoppers revealed poor customer service was second only to long lines. Good customer service is essential in developing loyal customers who are only a click or a few steps from visiting your competitors.

1. Assess Your Organization

Customer service begins with the internal customer also known as your employees. Assess your organization from the top down. In many cases, poor customer service is a symptom of a more serious undiscovered problem. HINT: Incorporate proven criteria such as Baldrige to determine what you do well and where you need to improve.

2. Assess Your Customer Service Training

Poor customer service is not because your employees don't know how to, but probably more often than not they don't want to. If your customer service training focuses only on knowledge and skills, you are draining your K.A.S.H. Box because you are failing to address attitudes and habits.

3. Don't Assume Employees Know What Good Customer Service Is

With the world a far different place than 50, 30 or even 10 years ago, don't assume that your potential and even current employees know what good customer service is. Specifically define what good customer service is. HINT: Good customer service is when a customer comes back, spends more and doesn't visit the competitor.

4. Deliver Customer Service Training in Real Time

Customer service training should extend beyond the procedures and policies. Infuse good communication skills and professional appearance within your learning sessions. Create mentors that new employees can job shadow.

5. Ask Potential or Existing Employees If They Buy From You?

If you are a retail chain, ask employees if they have ever bought from you? What did they like about your store or business? Many businesses ask the "Why do you want to work here?" question. Why not dig a little deeper?

6. Ask Yourself If You Would Buy From You?

This question may sound ridiculous, but would you buy from you?

7. Focus on Delivering Exceptional Customer Service

Exceptional customer service is when a customer brings or directs a new customer to your business.

Customer service is the beginning and the end for any business. All businesses are in customer service because without customers there would be no business. If your customer service is not at the exceptional level, then you are missing incredible opportunities to build your business and you are wasting a lot of money and resources. And,if that isn't bad enough, your poor customer service is growing your competitor's business.

Customer loyalty is the strategic advantage. Receive your downloadable Customer Loyalty Audit at http://www.processspecialist.com/customer-loyalty.htm

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Please feel free to contact me, Leanne Hoagland-Smith, Your Chief People Officer and Business Coach, who works with individuals and organizations that are tired of not being where they want to be and truly want more for their businesses and their selves. 219.508.2859

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If You Want To Outsmart Competitors, Make It Policy For Employees To Use Their Products

In a talk earlier this year to employees, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop asked a question that many were probably afraid to answer truthfully, given how Nokia is struggling to combat the iPhone. As BusinessWeek described it:

When he asks how many people in the crowd use an iPhone or Android device, few hands go up. "That upsets me, not because some of you are using iPhones, but because only a small number of people are using iPhones. I'd rather people have the intellectual curiosity to understand what we're up against."

This is refreshing statement; many executives would have berated their employees for not keeping the faith while a company faced its biggest crisis.

Don't Enforce a Monoculture

One of the surest ways of losing touch with real customers' needs and getting outsmarted by competitors is to enforce a monoculture in your organization, where competitive products are banned and employees only come into contact with your own offerings.

My first job out of college was at Sun Microsystems, and in those days (early 90's) it was forbidden to have any competitive products, whether they were from Microsoft, Silicon Graphics, Apple, or Dell. Since Sun made hardware and software, only Sun machines running the Sun operating system were allowed. (In the design group we did have a couple of Macs as the software we needed wasn't available for Sun's OS, but they had to be kept hidden away and bought and maintained clandestinely.)

As a result, every Sun employee lived in a Sun monoculture. This was unlike the environment most Sun customers inhabited, where there was a mix of hardware, software, and platforms from a variety of different vendors. Customers had to deal with integration issues that were never felt by Sun staff. Furthermore, Sun employees were "shielded" from understanding what competitive products could really do, or from gaining insights into how they might be falling short, or actually meeting customer needs better in some ways than Sun's products.

I remember when we were starting a new project that we had to visit the nearby Oracle headquarters (ironically, now Sun's owner) to get our hands on a wide variety of competitive hardware, as Oracle had to test its software on all platforms and manufacturers. We learned more in those few hours of hands-on tire-kicking than we would have been able to in weeks of desk research.

Encourage Competitive Use, Don't Punish It

Too often, buying and trying competitive products is frowned upon and even seen as a moral weakness. As I wrote about in Innovation X, when the team developing the second-generation Ford Taurus bought a Toyota Camry (with great difficulty) to try it out, it brought to light critical quality factors that significantly changed how the team approached its work. In her exhaustive book about this project, Mary Walton describes how buying competitive cars, especially Japanese ones, was seen as practically treasonous at Ford in the 1980's.

This attitude is not healthy. You should encourage people at all levels — starting at the top — to be immersed in your competitors' offerings, just as they should be immersed in understanding your customers' lives. Without a clear-eyed, honest perspective about how you are superior and where you are falling short, you will fall into a falsely narrow view of the world.

Walton also noted how Ford executives (as is the case at most car companies) were regularly given new cars, and all servicing was handled by in-house technicians. They never had to deal with oil changes, indifferent dealerships, older cars starting to wear out (since they got replaced so frequently), or any of the other annoyances that can come from car ownership. They lived in a perfect bubble that hid the quality advances their Japanese competitors were making in strides.

Go Further

Don't just encourage competitive usage, but make it policy. It's not always easy to do in some B2B cases, but for almost any consumer product or service there's really no reason why this can't become a regular practice.

Pay for products and services out of the company purse. Don't rely on people to pay it for themselves (because many won't, or will resent having to). Invest in paying for dummy or shadow service accounts, such as wireless or entertainment subscriptions, even insurance policies. Just because you may offer employees a discount on your own products or services doesn't mean that they can't also be encouraged to try out the competition.

Think like a library and make sure competitive offerings get passed around to different employees, and aren't just used by one person. Maximize the exposure and therefore the learning.

Hire curious people who seek out competitors and venture to the edges of your business to find the potential disruptors, trying out products and services that you may not see as current competitors but who may become ones in the future.

Have people formally or informally report on what they find so that others can gain the insights even if they didn't use the competitors firsthand (this becomes a type of pre-emptive knowledge management).

Backed up by concrete actions such as these, you can establish a culture where trying competitive products is not seen as the height of treason, but as loyalty.

This post originally appeared at Harvard Business Review.

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