How to Create a Service-Oriented Culture in Your Business

What can having poor customer service cost you?  Well, with YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook giving individuals the ability to send information around the world in seconds, it can cost you a LOT of bad publicity.  Just watch this video from CBS News about a frustrated United Airlines customer.  Below is the entire video mentioned in the news story.  This video was originally posted to YouTube on July 6, 2009, and - to date - has been viewed over 8,690,000 times.  Yes, EIGHT MILLION, SIX HUNDRED NINETY THOUSAND times.  

To be successful, companies must recognize and value the need to build strong professional relationships with their customers.  Gaining new customers is always more labor intensive and expensive than keeping current ones happy.  Yet, having customers who are merely satisfied isn’t enough anymore, says John Allen, president and COO of Houston-based HR and administrative services company G&A Partners.    To develop customer loyalty, companies must realize that customer service is more than simply understanding and responding to your customer’s needs.  According to Allen, “building  . . . life-long devotion in your customers to your company takes time, commitment and hard work.  It also requires a service-oriented company culture and employees who are committed to delivering exceptional care.”

To ensure that your business has a service-oriented culture you must:

Start out on the right foot – Commitment starts at the top, with the business owner or manager.  Your interactions with customers set the tone for how the entire organization views customers.

Be committed to doing whatever it takes to gain customer satisfaction – Hire the right people (and, alternately, get rid of the wrong ones), commit appropriate resources,  give employees the power to make decisions in given situations, and offer adequate training opportunities.  Put the customer’s needs before your own.

Empower your employees – Having been in a situation where it was not the case, I cannot stress enough how important it is for YOUR employees to feel respected and appreciated by YOU.  If they aren’t, they will either leave and go work for someone else who will appreciate and respect them (like I did), or stay but hate working for you.  And you can’t expect your employees to be able to excel at customer service if they hate working for you.  You need to treat your employees the way you want THEM to treat your customers.  Respect them.  Offer encouragement and guidance.  Give them the right tools, equipment, and training to perform their jobs well.  Make sure they understand specifically what is expected of them, but don’t micro-manage.  Encourage them to resolve as many issues on their own as they can, but be ready to step in when necessary.  Your employees cannot be expected to take abuse from irate customers.  There may be times when you will need to intercede on their behalf.  If you stand up for them, they will do the same for you.

Don’t promise what you can’t deliver – Saying “yes” when you know it is something you can’t make happen will inevitably end up frustrating and angering your customers.  Frustrated and angry customers don’t stay customers for long.  Alternatively, bluntly saying “no” can have the same affect (see video above).  Try to find ways to solve your customer’s problem.  If the answer has to be “no,” go out of your way to find an alternative that is acceptable to your customer.

Always look for ways to reduce errors – Review complaints, ask for feedback, listen to what your customers are saying.  If more than one has the same complaint, chances are there is something that needs to be addressed or a change that needs to be made.

Know your customer – The best way to find out what your customers expect from you is to TALK to them.  Interact with them.  Be sociable.  Seems like a no-brainer, but to give good customer service, you have to care about your customers as people.  You can’t really care about someone you don’t know. 

Make it easy for your customers to contact you – Nothing frustrates a customer more than having a problem that needs resolution and not being able to find a person to help them resolve it.  Ditch the automated answering system and have a real person answer your telephone.  If, for some reason, that isn’t an option, at the very least have an easily accessible way for the customer to get to a live person quickly – preferably without having to press 37 different buttons and listen to the same number of “help” menus to do so.  The customer who is simply frustrated when they first place the call will be highly ticked off after wasting 20 minutes with an automated phone system.  Trust me.  I’ve been that customer.  Recently.  And there is a tweet to prove it (SEARS).  And whatever you do, if you insist on using a “voice recognition” system, make sure you include number alternatives.  Not doing so is the same as telling the customer to hang up and never call back.