COFFEE, TEA OR ME
By
What a wonderful phrase! It brings back images of the caring attitudes of the airlines during their earlier days. These days, airlines continue to revise their services as the tastes and needs of their customers change.
Customer service is to business what motherhood and apple pie are to
But, what are you really doing about it?
Many years ago in another company, as part of our strategic planning, we studied the strengths and weaknesses of our competitors and ourselves. That study led us to recognize a competitive need to improve our customer service.
The next step was to do more than just pay lip service to the phrase "Customer Service." We defined the standards of quality service that truly responded to the needs of our customers. Strategically, it was important to make it easy for our customers to work with us.
We spent a good chunk of money on advertising. In the end, the sole purpose of those expenditures was to get an interested buyer to call.
We made sure we had an adequate number of phone lines to handle our peak periods. You don't get an order if the customer always gets a busy signal.
Our company's work hours had to correspond with those of our customers. Your odds for closing the order improve if you are there when a customer has that overwhelming urge to buy.
We also examined a customer's first impression of us. After all you can only make that first impression once. Not surprisingly, the telephone receptionist was the caller's first contact within our company. The tone of the entire contact could be created or destroyed at that moment.
Traditionally, the receptionist is the lowest paid mundane position in many companies. After all, how hard can it be just to answer the phone. And, since the phone doesn't ring all the time, you can load them up with all kinds of other miscellaneous chores. We always had new people on the phones, as the former ones wanted to grow into more "important" positions. If the receptionist's position opened up, we rushed to just hire someone. To rectify this perception, we dramatically altered the status and importance of the "telephone receptionist." We selected one of our more senior people and paid her very well. She was very personable, didn't rattle easily, knew our product well and the job duties and capabilities of all our people.
During the prime calling hours her sole responsibility was to intelligently question the caller and, in a friendly way, identify the most efficient way to handle the caller's needs. In other words she was to immediately convey the message that their call was important to us.
We also established other goals. One goal was never to let the phone ring three times. Everyone in the company, including the President, was responsible for picking up the phone by the second ring.
Generally, the customer service people could see when our receptionist was busy with another customer, and would answer it on the first or second ring. But it was always gratifying to see so many other people reach for the phone on the third ring.
The other major goal was never to transfer the caller more than once. Sometimes it was necessary to transfer the call to a different department to better handle the caller's problem/opportunity. If so, that individual's responsibility was to satisfying the caller's needs.
All this related to our strategic plan. In this case our mission statement needed to be revisited to clarify the focus on customer service. Once we agreed on the company's mission, it was a simple process to create objectives and goals to accomplish it.
If service to your customer is a necessary part of your business, specific objectives and goals must be created to achieve the standard of quality you wish to represent.
Have you done that within your company? If you haven't, just wait. One of your competitors will.