A Customer Service Blog

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting to an audience of 100+ business owners in a beautiful country house near Lewes in Sussex.  My colleague and I had the privelege to be asked to present a ten minute slot at the Sussex Enterprise’s Sales Maximisation event.

The topic of our discussion was assessing the lifetime value of each individual customer.  We used examples of a cup of coffee through to a high-end software purchase and the main point throughout was that each so called “moment of truth” within customer service is vital.  Many people often only view each transaction within its face value context so for example a cup of coffee may only cost £2 but if that customer keeps coming back their value to say Starbucks can keep growing exponentially.

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Yesterday we gave you part one of our interview with Noel Pope, Director of Merityre Specialists, a company bucking the trend and using excellence in customer service to drive their business forward in this challenging time.

Here is part 2 and the concluding part of the interview.  GA Training has been working in partnership with Merityre to provide customer service training that helps drive the business forward.

GT: How do you monitor customer service levels within Merityre?

NP: One easy measure is the number of customer complaints we receive but we also regularly take part in mystery shopping exercises to assess the levels of customer service within Merityre.

GT: What is your opinion on mystery shopping in general?

NP: It is an incredibly useful tool when used correctly. The most important thing is to take action on the results. Without the follow up action being taken the exercise is pretty pointless but if you do follow up correctly it is invaluable.

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I was very pleased recently when the Director of Merityre Specialists, Noel Pope, agreed to take the time to have lunch with me and take part in a short, informal interview about his company’s commitment to achieving excellence in customer service.

Merityre are renowned for providing way above average levels of customer service in their business and I am always very interested in interviewing anybody who demonstrates an unwavering commitment to customer service from the top of their organisation.  I like to know what makes them tick and most importantly how they achieve such great results in terms of customer satisfaction.

This interview will be published in two parts with the second part available to view tomorrow.

Merityre Specialists Limited was formed in 1961. Based in Andover in Hampshire, the company has enjoyed considerable success. It operates 19 branches throughout southern England, including several in the Thames Valley.

Merityre has one aim:   “To provide a service that exceeds our customers’ expectations.”

GA Training has been providing customer service training to Merityre since 2007 and we are now in out third year of working together in partnership.

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Anyone who has been reading this blog over the last month or so will be aware of all the problems we have had with our good friends at British Telecom.

Suffice to say that when we recently moved offices BT did absolutely everything in their power to mess up the process and we ended up without any internet for over a week.

Last week I wrote on this blog that there are three key stages to customer service - the before, the during and the after.  BT contrived to mess up all three parts of the process in some way or another.

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There are three major stages to achieving excellence in customer service.  They are quite simply -

1. What happens before someone buys from you?
2. What happens during the transaction?
3. What happens after the transaction has taken place (including what happens when things go wrong)?

Only those organisations who pay equal attention to each of the above three stages will have a hope of achieving excellence in customer service.

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Anyone who has traveled on Eurostar will probably have had a good experience.  There really is nothing like it for convenience and ease of travel, it is so much more pleasant than the plane in every way.  Overall Eurostar does well with its customer service or at least it does well when things are going well but what happens when things go wrong like they did just before Christmas?

In case anyone is not familiar with this story allow me to fill in the gaps.  Due to heavy snow the Eurostar network ground to a halt just before Christmas.  Trains were stuck in tunnels, people were stuck on platforms and overall it was a great big mess.

This morning sees the publishing of a report into the matter which as well as being critical of the technology that failed due to the snow the report is expected to be damning about Eurostar’s customer service.

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I was pleased to see BT announcing record profits this morning.  First of all I was pleased because my call which apparently cost them £150 should hopefully be able to be absorbed by the £128m profits made. Secondly I am pleased because hopefully they might reinvest some of this profit into improving their frankly useless cak-handed systems.

When I left you yesterday we had identified 5 or so key customer service failings and we were only 24 hours into the sorry affair.

By the afternoon of Wednesday (two days after my order had been canceled by BT, not me) I had still heard nothing.  I was actually away from the office on other business and didn’t have time to call them until Wednesay afternoon.  I was still totally in the dark over when i would be connected or indeed if my order had even been resubmitted.

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Followers of this blog will have noticed that we have had very few posts over the last week or so.  For this you can blame our good friends at British Telecom.

I have honestly never had such a frankly depressing, awkward and infuriating customer experience.

I am very pleased to announce that GA Training has just moved to a lovely new and modern office and problems with BT aside we are all very happy.

On the day of the move I was told that an engineer would meet our IT engineer and install both the phone line and subsequently broadband at the new office.  We gave our staff a day off and told them to be in bright eyed and bushy tailed first thing the next day to start working.

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To achieve excellence in customer service and truly delight your customers there needs to be a unwavering commitment to this from the very top of the organisation.  Without this you will fail, despite the best efforts of your frontline staff.

Whenever you find an organisation that is consistently achieving customer delight you can always and without exception trace this back to the head of the organisation.  Okay there is the occasional exception to this rule but it is a fluke, a lucky shot or an anomaly.  It also will not be sustainable.

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About a week or so ago now Verdict Research published their latest report on customer satisfaction and guess what John Lewis came out on top again for the third year running.  So Britain’s best loved department store is also Britain’s best loved store in general beating off competition to secure the prize.

The top five were -

1. John Lewis
2. Amazon
3. Play
4. Dunelm Mill
5. Marks and Spencer

John Lewis has also just posted better than average sales so it goes to show that if you put customer satisfaction at the heart of what you do you will reap the benefits.

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