Whatever you’re selling, making, delivering or doing, there is likely to be an element of service, says Jane Sunley, so the onus is on leaders to embed a culture of offering great customer service, every time
There’s some great service in this world; and some that is, frankly, appalling. The challenge is significant, since customers and consumers want bigger, better, cooler, faster, more ‘wow’. And there are competitor organisations chomping at the bit to give it to them.
There is clear alignment between employee engagement and customer satisfaction.
Therefore, if you want to achieve lasting results that will keep evolving, adapting and improving over time, it cannot simply be ‘trained’ in or ‘road-showed’. You can design as many customer charters you like; they will only be effective if the people delivering care, believe and want to do it. As with your values, embedding service is not any sort of ‘initiative’, it is an ongoing culture thing.
It is important to have happy, engaged people giving service on the basis that they care about the organisation and the people to whom they are providing your service. This is why it’s important to deal with the disengaged. You can show people the ‘how’ time and time again, but if they don’t care or they don’t understand the ‘why’ then you’re not going to get the required result. This is because they are adults with their own values, opinions, circumstances and aspirations. These need to be aligned with yours for this to work.
It’s also very important that people are properly enabled and empowered to give good service. Assuming you employ the right people, they need to be trusted to do what it takes to make the customer happy. For this to work, you will need a broad framework of ‘non-negotiables’ within which it is possible for service people to use their judgement as to what is required to meet individual needs (yep – customers are not all identical).
If you still have them, please throw out the rigid tomes of ‘SOPs’ (standard operating procedures) dealing with every eventuality – it’s impossible to keep up (and no-one reads them anyway). Instead, embed a service culture (which is harder to do, but actually works – generally with stellar results).
Designing your service culture
Once you have the right people in place, you can set about designing your service culture. It stands to reason that the people who know most about your customers are the people who serve them every day. So it follows that they should be involved from the get go. This is not a time for the L&D department to put a programme together and train it in. Nor is it a time to bring in some experts to tell you and your teams how to do ‘customer service’.
This is going to need very careful planning and super-competent facilitation and that’s where your L&D department and/or external expertise comes in.
Find out who is giving great service, who lives your values and could be viewed as a service role model.
Make a list of these people. This is just as likely to be Stevie in the post room as it is your head of client services.
Then ask for volunteers to work on shaping your ‘service of the future’. Hopefully there will be some people who appear on your previously written list. Select a diverse group, including as many junior-level employees as possible. This is great development for them and you will receive fantastic buy-in and loyalty from their involvement. Free up some of their time so they can contribute without worrying that their job or colleagues will suffer.
Use great facilitation to enable volunteers to explore how service works within your organisation; the good, the bad and the ugly. And where they’d like to take it. This will enable them (not you) to work out how it can be delivered. They’ll use this information to work out your non-negotiables framework. This is complex stuff and needs to be fully explored in all of its aspects.
Once leadership is on-board and prepared to give people the freedom (within your framework) to deliver, you can set about making it happen.
Service champions
Ask for members of the group and others to volunteer as service champions. Teach these champions, and all managers, how to facilitate subsequent sessions and conversations around service improvement. This is to enable different customer groups, situations and so forth to be explored within the context of your service culture so that people have the time to work out how they can do the best job possible.
During these sessions, all the barriers to great service will be uncovered – you have to be ready and willing to deal with them.
Once this has been done, you’ll obviously be looking at your metrics (e.g. net promoter score) and adjusting as required. From then on, it’s an ongoing process as new people join, your service champions come and go and, crucially, business needs change.
This approach enables you to pick up on subtle changes and potential pitfalls before they grow.
Your people on the ground are your greatest service asset so use them…
A 10 point plan for embedding service excellence
- Employ the right people, ensuring your values are embedded.
- Identify who your customers are.
- Identify service champions to lead this (bottom-up approach).
- Map the customer journey.
- Use service people to design ‘how service works here’ (needs great facilitation).
- Establish a clear framework of service non-negotiables.
- Ensure leadership is on-board and role models for service.
- Develop managers, champions and others to support, redesign, listen and act.
- Use champions and service people to work with others on how they’ll deliver (it’s a virtuous circle).
- Publicise great stories and examples of success.
A quick note about… complaints
Apparently, some organisations have target limits for the number of complaints received. All complaints should be welcomed and swiftly and adeptly dealt with. That old adage about unhappy customers telling 10 people can be completely reversed if you handle it well. A complaint is an opportunity to create an advocate. If they tell 16 people how well you dealt with their issue, then great. We’re all going to mess up from time to time, that’s life; people expect it. Your job is to ensure its handled with grace, to business advantage.
Case study: Dorchester Collection
Dorchester Collection won the coveted UK Customer Experience Award, 2015; judged to provide the best customer service in its sector. Eugenio Pirri, vice president of people and organisational development explains how…
“For any service business, the talent, skills and engagement of its people provide competitive advantage. Things like how warm the welcome was, whether genuine care and interest was expressed, were people working together seamlessly and did the guest leave feeling appreciated; combine to create what we define as the ultimate guest experience.
“It is our mission and focus to deliver this level of experience; better-than-world-class guest service, consistently. It’s no surprise then that the previously mentioned behaviours are our guest engagement key drivers.
“L&D is much more than a tick box exercise. When L&D strategies are designed with employees, customers and owners in mind, the benefits are significant.
“Our long-term L&D strategy is focused on increasing engagement and retention; up-skilling high potential individuals; and developing creative learning innovations to enhance guest experience.
“Guest engagement is measured through clear, physical, functional and emotional drivers such as experiencing seamless processes; improving a guest’s life and working as a team.
“It is vital that people are appropriately skilled, developed, engaged and motivated throughout their employee journey. What’s more, if we are truly to deliver exceptional service, this development must be driven by our guests. This is why all the development initiatives we undertake have to have a positive impact on both guest engagement and the bottom-line.
“For example, guest engagement scores highlighted a mismatch between guest complaints and employee response. Our people were not fully engaged in complaint handling and therefore treated the complaint as a request rather than something requiring resolution.
“As a result, we launched ‘ProMisses’ – problems and missed expectations – to solve guest issues. Aligned to this was learning through the academy; enabling skills and confidence to take initiative when handling complaints.
“By taking this approach to customer service, our guest engagement drivers have increased significantly; driving additional revenue and savings.‘
