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February 12, 2004
How to improve customer service (Part 2)
[Started on January 5, 2004. Finished today.]
In Part 1, I discussed how businesses struggle with customer service (and many other communications behaviors) because they don't invest in training employees to improve these critical skills.
So what specifically does an organization need to do to improve relationships with customers and between employees?
Here are some thoughts I had during and after I took several training classes (the first I've ever taken in my decade-long carreer):
Excellent Customer Service is a learned behavior (much of which is unlearning bad habits), and a deliberate concious effort. Much of it is un-natural, and it doesn't develop by itself. On their own, people will usually not provide consistently good customer service. Good customer service comes as a result of a focused, concerted, persistent and consistent program to train, practice, refine and provide good customer service.
Good service to external customers of an organization is only possible if there is good customer service internal to an organization. The organization cannot successfully serve it's external customers unless internally the same principles are practiced between employees who work together to serve the external customers. If I can't rely on my co-workers to have the integrity, courtesy, responsibility, etc to get their part of the job done, and they on me, then as an organization we can't possibly provide excellent customer service.
Good customer service is more wholistic than most people perceive. It is not just being polite on the phone, or just doing exactly what the customer wants, or restraining oneself from profanity when talking to an irate customer. It is taking ownership and responsibility, being proactive, following-up, being courteous, good communications, conflict resolution, giving and receiving negative feedback, and so much more. And it's usually much more about the subtle "in-between" events, issues and observations, than the obvious major interactions most people focus on. These behaviors are just as important when working with internal customers as they are with external customers (refer to point above).
(This is more specific to University of Utah, but I'm sure similar classes are available from a variety of training centers). Univ. of Utah has an excellent professional development program that teaches classes on all of these topics. An organization can benefit substantially if everyone attends these classes and incorporates the principles into their work habits. If there was a formal training program, with some type of certification, it would further motivate people to develop these professional behaviors.
Excellent customer service is ultimately less work, and more enjoyable work, for us as employees. Initially it seems like--probably is--more work, but what we won't realize until we get there is that poor customer service not only makes for less-enjoyable relationships with our customers, it makes a lot more work for us. Organizations that provide excellent customer service have less work to do to keep their customers satisfied, and enjoy doing that work more.
Too often, organizations underestimate the amount of effort required to achieve Excellent Customer Service. If all it took was telling people to do those things, then every organization would already be doing them.
The only organizations I know of who have successfully incorporated those behaviors have only done so after investing a tremendous amount of effort and passion over a long period of time at every level of the organization. I do not know of any organization that felt the investment did not pay off many times over (I can, however, think of many organizations who were unwilling to make the necessary investment and continue to suffer because of it).
Posted by pete at February 12, 2004 12:58 PM
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