A Customer Service Blog

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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As the snow continues to fall in the South of the country customer service operatives will be under increasing pressure to deliver services that are desperately needed.

Today’s blog gives a quick summary of the crucial difference between being assertive as distinct from being aggressive or submissive.

Assertiveness is a term given to behaviour that comes from a belief that your needs or wants are AS important as those of other people.

The alternative to this belief is that your needs are either LESS (submissive) or MORE (aggressive) important than those of other people.  Thinking your needs are less important often leads to passive or accommodating behaviour and thinking your needs are more important generally leads to aggressive behaviour.

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Over the weekend I was in the unfortunate position of having to call upon my British Gas Homeserve agreement as my boiler decided to go on the blink just as my family and I were settling down to watch a film, well my wife and I were settling down whilst our 1 year old was running riot around the lounge.

I called British Gas and explained the problem to them and asked for them to send an engineer out.  As we have a young child we were viewed as a priority fix and an engineer visit was booked for later in the day.

The lady on the phone was very efficient and left me in no doubt that an engineer would visit or if this became impossible for any reason they would let me know.

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