It starts at the top
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.
Organisations that consistently excel in the area of customer service have obsessive leaders. These people are in touch with both their staff and customers at all times, they also love metrics and measurements. It is simply no good expecting your staff to excel in customer service if you are not fully committed to this.
Being a bit of a customer service geek I am fascinated by organisations that achieve extraordinary results in the area of customer satisfaction. I have spent time with these people and studied what they do differently that sets them apart. The one word that keeps coming up is obsessive.
To achieve high levels of customer satisfaction the leaders in a business need to be obsessive about customer service. They live and breathe their customer experiences, they mystery shop, they innovate, they mirror successful behaviour from other companies and industries and they spent a great deal of time studying what is working and what can be improved (and there is always something that can be improved).
Successful leaders in customer service also involve their staff and they experience customer touch points for themselves.
Take the following two examples of how not to do things. How many times have you been into a toilet in an organisation and thought to yourself “when was the last time the leaders of this organisation experienced this?” It never ceases to amaze me how dirty and unfriendly people’s facilities are and you wonder when the last time they even visited the place was. This is a small indicator but one that also speaks volumes about whether those at the top of the organisation are passionate about providing excellent customer service.
The second example is something we personally experienced. We were in a pitching situation for a series of customer service courses and when we spoke to the MD he said “customers? I try and stay as far away from them as possible.” This comment astounded me and worse still it was made in front of the customer service director for the organisation. The gentleman in question was trying to be funny but you know the old saying “never a truer word spoken than in jest.”
Over the next couple off weeks I will be publishing a couple of interviews I carried out recently with MDs of companies that consistently achieve high levels of customer satisfaction. These individuals are passionate about customer service and both would not mind me saying that they are obsessive about delivering innovation, excellence in service and ultimately achieving customer delight. When you read the interviews you will see that It is no coincidence that both companies are achieving above industry average sales figures and repeat business, in difficult industries and trading conditions.