A wife sits on the sofa next to her husband who is reading his laptop. She says, “I love you.” No response. She says a little louder, “I love you.” Complete silence. She then questions directly, “You know, I say ‘I love you’ a lot to you, but you never say it back to me. Why is that?” The husband looks up from his computer and declares “Look, I said I loved you when we got married. If that should change, I’ll let you know.”
Now, really, do you think that is enough to sustain the love? Of course not. If you want to be recognized for your commitment to personal values like trust, honesty, or respect, you must practice, not simply preach. It is no different for your business values when you are leading others. Too often, the value of service excellence is communicated only at new employee orientation and the on-the-job training during the first week with no reinforcement thereafter. That is simply not enough to drive consistent customer care performance. And while I enjoy presenting my customer experience seminars to clients, I always let them know that learning about customer service cannot be seen as an event, but must be seen as a process. If your intent is to drive customer service excellence, you need to say it and your team needs to hear it more than just one time.
One of my favorite quotes is from Samuel Johnson, “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” You must continually remind your team that when it comes to customer service, being consistently good is better than being occasionally great. Here are a few ideas:
- Make sure customer service values and skills are included in the job description and reviewed at each performance evaluation.
- Check out Successories.com, Baudville.com or SimpleTruths.com for ideas on creating and reinforcing a sustained customer focused message.
- If your company has an intranet, use the screensaver feature to remind your team of your customer service values.
- Post thank you letters from customers in a prominent area where your team can read them.
- If you receive a compliment from a customer on your voice mail, broadcast it to the others on your team.
- Write a letter of commendation recognizing a specific customer service act that can be placed in the associate’s personnel file. Send the letter to the associate’s home. What is your ratio of written thank you notes or commendations versus written corrective action notices? In order to create a culture of customer care, the ratio should be 3 to 1, and better still 5 to 1.
- Review social media sites to recognize any employee who has been mentioned positively by customers.
- Recognize an individual’s act of kindness that was appreciated by a customer with a small token of acknowledgement. (movie tickets, free dry cleaning, a day off with pay)
- Start every meeting with an opportunity for attendees to thank someone in the group for their actions in support of internal or external customer care.
- Periodically send out reminder messages via email, paycheck stuffer or company newsletter on the importance of the customer. If you are short of ideas, take a look at my Facebook page that offers customer service tips, quotes and insight from various sources.
- Always serve as a role model by interacting and responding to each individual on your team with the intent to live the credo first used by Jan Carlzon, president of SAS Airlines, “If you’re not taking care of the customer, you better be taking care of the person who is.”
QUI TAKEAWAY: Commit to periodically reminding your team of the value of customer service excellence. Otherwise their delivery of exceptional service will be inconsistent. It’s up to you to commit to their lifelong learning because once is never enough.
BILL QUISENG | Deliver the World's Best Customer Experience 