March 5, 2018

How a smart frontline can make your business successful

Source: Unsplash

How a smart frontline can make your business successful.

Every organization is looking for the ingredient that will give them a competitive advantage; make them stand out among their competitors.

In my experience most organizations turn to what the prevailing strategy development theory says which often promulgates these types of ways to outpace ‘the bad guys’:

- introduce a disruptive technology
- achieve cost leadership
- lead in product or service quality
- differentiate products or services
- form an alliance with another company
- leadership in new product development
- expand markets
- offer low prices
- achieve economies of scale and scope
- focus on a product or market sector

These are all valid ways of looking at competitive advantage, but beating the competition in the long term isn’t about the brilliance of a strategy, and it’s not about whether or not a strategic plan conforms to strategic planning methodology as espoused by the experts.

Competitive advantage is derived largely from not from what you aspire to achieve, but how you actually achieve it in the real world where organizations are challenged by unpredictability, uncertainty and constantly changing conditions.
If, for example, your strategic intent is to outdo the competition by providing excellent service quality, your success will be determined by how you execute on this goal.

Actions such as providing customer-friendly rules and policies, recruiting people who have an innate desire to serve others, empowering employees to make decisions in favour of a customer and compensating teams on the level of customer service provided will enable the service quality goal to be achieved.

And notwithstanding the rise of the online world, the common element to achieving most of these actions is people.
Successful strategies typically get executed on the frontline at ‘the coal face’ between the customer and the organization — the territory normally occupied by employees in sales, banking, coffee bistros, call centers, repair service centers, retail outlets and on reception desks.

These are the people who control every moment of the customer experience.

How well do you think we would have survived the COVID-19 pandemic without frontline people in all types of roles: food preparation, hospital workers of all types, care givers, nurses, first responders, food delivery folks, and product pickers fulfilling online orders to mention just a few?

Blood flows in any organization for one reason and one reason only: the frontline.

Frontline people live your brand. They invest their emotional energy to keep customers loyal.

It’s one thing to send prospective customers to your website to learn about new products and buy them; but it’s quite another to make the engagement process so enjoyable and painless that the new product flows off the shelf and continues to provide value to the customer over the life of their purchase.

The frontline fills a critical void — Organizations are morphing to an operations topology devoid of humans.
Online research, purchase, chat and warranty claim tasks are more and more being performed by the customer themselves. And new self checkout technologies are being tested to further remove people from the cost equation and provide consumers more speed and convenience of DIY.

But even in the face of a migration to DIY, successful organizations keep a strong people element in their sales and service operations to simply be there to help a customer when they don’t get satisfaction from a technology face.

Let’s face it, precise and accurate algorithms for every customer need can’t be formulated so if a backup person isn’t there to deal with hiccups and follow up questions, the customer is not only upset, they leave telling their friends and family how crummy your service is.

The focus and attention always seems to be on the brilliance and cleverness of the grand plan and the importance of execution is given second shrift and is taken for granted.

In fact most organizations assume that the people will naturally understand what needs to be done (rarely happens without the leader’s translation of what it means to various functions) and employees will willingly devote themselves to executing it effectively (never happens without leadership convincing them of its importance and supporting them to get it done).

Keep the frontline well informed — The frontline of any organization is the key to a successful strategy and yet they are often not equipped with the information they need to handle customer questions like: ‘Why don’t you add this type of draft beer?’ or ‘Why did you take spaghetti and meat balls off the menu?’ Or ‘Why do I have to wait so long to get a customer service representative on the phone?’

Leadership, for whatever reason, generally chooses not to share the details on matters such as product line selection, pricing rationale, credit rules and customer service policies with customer contact employees.

My experience is that the frontline is rarely viewed as a critical element of strategy and that is shortsightedness on the part of leadership.

They think either that the frontline doesn’t need to know the details or that they can figure it out themselves.

I once asked a teller at a credit union why I should do business with them and not a bank. She was startled with my question and said “Because we share our profits with our members, and banks don’t” — not a compelling answer.

The truth is it wasn’t her fault; she wasn’t given the appropriate answer by the leadership who should be supporting her efforts. And so she was left to improvise and invent the answer herself.
Leaders need to be more actively engaged in promoting the importance of frontline employees, and keeping them informed should be a priority; here are four actions to make it happen.

When frontline people don’t have the information to answer a customer‘s question, they feel like idiots.

Promote the frontline’s importance — Elevate frontline employees to the top of the need-to-know funnel. Effective customer engagement creates loyal customers and long term profitability so why would you not want to equip frontline employees with every tool they need to deliver incredible moments?
And communicate what you are doing throughout the organization so everyone knows the cultural change being made.
Beats me why they seem to take the back seat to other groups when it comes to getting the information they need to talk to customers.

Determine their information needs — Ask frontline people (strike a frontline panel to help) what the top 10 questions customers ask them for which they have no answers.
And take their questions verbatim. Don’t allow their bosses to translate them into what they really mean, because all this does is distort the frontlines’ own words.
Feed the questions back to the panel and ask for sign off before providing answers.

Modify the management performance evaluation plan — Rate managers’ performance in part on how effective they are at providing the frontline with the information they need. Ask the frontline to rate managers; they will provide honest input.

As president of the data and internet company, I implemented an internal report card process that had customer service reps rate my management team on their ability to equip them with the info they needed to serve their customers.

The first report card rated managers poorly; improvements in subsequent rounds were seen as action plans were implemented to address the shortfalls.

Engage the frontline in systems design — Who better to determine what information systems look like than the people who use them? Unfortunately this is rarely done.
Yes, we stipulate that systems designers determine the requirements of all stakeholder groups, but the frontline teams are not given top priority.

Frontline supervisors are asked along with managers in finance, inventory control, marketing and business development but frontline employees — those actually engaging with customers — generally aren’t given the chance to input directly to what the system should look like.

To deal with this issue, I created cross functional teams of frontline people who had the final say on how information systems that affected the customer contact process should be designed. And they were given top priority stakeholder status; others came after the needs of customer engagement were recognized.

This action did two things: first, it demonstrated to the rest of the organization that frontline needs were the top priority to support our customer experience strategic game plan and second, it showed frontline people themselves that their needs were paramount.

Frontline people are key to delivering an organization’s strategy, but leaders have a responsibility to ensure that well informed frontline employees is essential.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 3.5.18 at 03:07 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

August 21, 2017

4 simple ways to have amazing customer service

Source: Unsplash

4 simple ways to have amazing customer service.

Blowing the socks off your customers is not a one act play; it’s a synchronized series of continuous actions that is repeated throughout an organization day in and day out.

Consistently delivering amazing service requires a carefully thought out service strategy, with two essential elements: core service — what you deliver to people — and the service experience — how they feel when it is delivered.

Core service

Core service is the basic product or service you provide the market.
Without a core service you don’t have a business.
If you’re in the communications business, for example, your core services are defined by your product portfolio and include television entertainment, internet and mobile services as well as billing and repair services.

If you’re in the hospitality world, your core service includes clean rooms, interesting surrounding attractions and good food.

Core service is not a source of customer loyalty. Customers expect their internet service to work every time they use it; they are not dazzled when it actually works — I’ve never heard a customer say ‘WOW! I’ve just sent an email and it was sent through the internet incredibly well — it was delivered just the way I wrote it.’

Likewise I don’t recall anyone saying ‘OMG! My hotel room was so clean it was a Rembrandt in every way.’

Customers expect your core service to deliver on its promise and work flawlessly every time, and when it does they give you a ‘C’ on your service report card. Meeting expectations earns you and average rating and that’s all.
On the other hand, when the internet service doesn’t work or the hotel room is a mess, the customer is extremely dissatisfied and quickly tell their friends and family how crummy their service provider is.

The bottom line is if you want to earn the right to build a loyal customer base, you must deliver consistent core service as your foundation.

The service experience

The service experience is the critical layer of service that must be wrapped around your core service. It’s the feelings layer that answers the question “How do you feel when you receive your provider’s core service?”
— How would you rate the experience of signing up for internet service?
— How do you feel about the cleanliness of your hotel room?
— How’s your patience after waiting 40 minutes in a call center queue for a rep?
— Do you feel honoured and respected by your financial advisor?
— Are your questions met with friendliness and charm by the service people you reach out to?

On the back of consistent core service, the source of customer loyalty is the service experience; dazzling a customer will get you an ‘A’ — or excellent — on your service report card and they will keep coming back and tell everyone else how wonderful you are.

Amaze = deliver consistent and seamless core service for each and every customer transaction and dazzle them when you do it

How does an organization create dazzling experiences for their customers and amaze them?

Source: Unsplash

#1. Hire people who like humans

First, they need to recruit people who like to deal with other people. How can any organization provide amazing service if their people don’t like homo sapiens?

The most critical step if you want to amaze your customers is to hire people with the innate desire and ability to serve and please others

Why is it that we run into service people who obviously hate their job and would rather be taking inventory or working with technology rather than real people?
Why is it that frontline positions are filled with people who have a lot of seniority in an organization but basically don’t like working with other people?
Ever been in a restaurant and have been afraid that the server would either throw something at you or subject your underdone steak to the germ population residing on the floor of the kitchen?

First of all, there is no more important position in any organization that one that deals directly with the public.
These people should be called, as Tom Peters once called them, ‘Supreme Commanders’. They literally control all aspects of an organization that involve its brand: honesty, integrity, caring attitude, responsiveness and overall service quality.

In any call center operations, reps handle thousands of ‘moments of truth’ every single day! Do you think they could influence customer perception toward the company and subsequent decisions to buy a product or service?. No question.

Second, why would the leadership of the organization put anyone into such an important job if they didn’t have the requisite skills and attitude to serve other people? Beats me but they do.
I believe this dysfunctional behavior is due to the fact that they look at these positions as entry level junior jobs rather than a career destination responsible for influencing customer loyalty and long term profitability.

These actions can be taken to make sure you get people obsessed with serving people in frontline positions.

Ask the right question — Ensure the recruitment guide asks the right questions to expose this virtue. I find that there are many of what I would call hygiene questions asked, but rarely do I find that the ‘love’ questions are absent to any significant degree.

Come right out and ask the candidate ‘Do you love people?’ and then ask them to describe 3 situations that proved it. You can tell quickly if the person is suitable to turn loose on your most valuable assets (customers) or not.
The ‘lover’ will tell you a story that makes you tingle; the rest will tell stories that leave you cold. Hire the ‘tinglers’.

Engage leaders in the interview — Have a senior person (an executive leader is the best choice) in the organization to participate in the panel interview process — I did this all the time.
This achieves three purposes:
— it shows people in the organization that hiring frontliners is a critically important matter;
— the candidate understands how serious the organization is about getting ‘people lovers’ in these positions;
— it enhances the richness of the interview itself in terms of the questions senior people bring to the table.

Don’t look to training for the solution — Can you train people to like people?
My experience is a resounding NO! You either have an innate proclivity to like humans or you don’t; no amount of training will change that. Training might influence how you behave — talk with a smile in your voice for example — and as long as the customer interaction is scripted you might get away with it.

The reality is, however that customers can’t always be scripted and sooner or later the trained frontliner will have to rely on their natural abilities to handle a challenging customer in an elegant and memorable way.

Be proactive in finding the ‘lovers’ — You should always have a frontline recruitment program underway to ensure that you are gathering the best people lovers you can to fuel the funnel created by employee turnover.
Tag ‘em early by going to schools at all levels and spotting the chosen ones.

#2. Recover from your service blunders

The second source of customer amazement is how service breakdowns are handled. Typically service breakdowns include such things as a broken promise made to a customer, a product or service that doesn’t work the way the manual says it should, billing mistakes or service repairs that need to be redone because they weren’t completed right the first time.

The solution to these missteps is called service recovery and it’s formula is simple:

Service recovery = fix the screw-up and do the unexpected.

Let’s face it when you screw a customer over, they expect you to fix it. But they’re not particularly blown away when you correct your error; they don’t say ‘WOW I can’t believe you actually remedied what you screwed up!’
This is where most companies fall short. They actually believe that by merely fixing their mistake the customer will be satisfied and their obligations will have been fulfilled.

The rule of recovery: fix the mistake fast and then blow the customer away by surprising them with something they don’t expect

If your goal is merely to satisfy a customer, you may be content with having a fix it capability that is incredibly efficient. But if you want to create the ability to consistently build customer loyalty and earn their lifelong trust you need to go further.
You need to move from a positive response to ‘Were you satisfied with what we did to fix our service screw up?’ to ‘Did we blow you away with what we did to recover from our mistake?’

The surprise factor

If you choose the path of wanting to delight your customers and create memorable service experiences for them, you need to understand that the source of of an amazing experience is doing what the customer doesn’t expect. The challenge, therefore is to discover exactly what that little bit extra is and for them to do it in a way that makes their eyes bulge out with amazement.

And the key is that the surprise act must be relevant to the customer. Providing something extra for the customer that doesn’t resonate with their needs, wants and desires will leave them scratching their head.
And it’s not about coming up with a boilerplate trash-and-trinket program that provides the same bland response to every customer — you’re wasting your money.
The surprise must have personal meaning to the customer otherwise it will be ineffective — in fact could make matters worse!

The surprise must also be extremely compelling to the customer; it must be a high priority with them if you want to impress them.
This is the emotional component of recovery. A compelling act will stir the emotions and make the customer believe you actually care about them.

Customer secrets and speed

The successful surprise requires that you need to understand what makes the person screwed over tick; what turns them on and what action on your part would most likely trigger an emphatic emotional response. You need to know their secrets — reread ‘How to build an amazing marketing machine’.

You can be relevant and compelling in your recovery act, but if you take a week to get it done, forget it. Your investment will be worthless.
Studies have found that you have about 24 hours to get it done; after that, the ability to capitalize on the screwup and build stronger customer loyalty goes down the tube.

If you make a mistake and recover in a dazzling way, the customer is more loyal to the organization than they were prior to the screw up

If recovery is such a critical element in building customer loyalty, why are there very few organizations that have a recovery service strategy? I suspect it’s because no one likes to admit that they will have a service OOPS! from time to time; they pride themselves on trying to get it right the first time. But if you know that mistakes will happen from time to time — and they will — and that there is tremendous strategic value in recovering well — and there is — why wouldn’t you have a plan on the actions to take when the event happens?

In my past role as Business Services VP with a major telecommunications company, one of the elements of our service strategy was: ‘If we fail, Recovery will be our #1 priority’.
We had a specific recovery plan that, for each customer segment, provided the range of recovery actions that could be considered to respond to an OOPS! and the level of recovery investment necessary given the value customers represented to the company — the higher the value, the more robust the recovery actions requiring greater investments.
And substantial training was given to all employees to ensure they understood the power of the strategy and what to do when a screwup occurred.

5 key recovery takeaways

▪️Recovery = fix it and do the unexpected;
▪️Do something personal; make it relevant and compelling;
▪️Know your customers’ secrets;
▪️Get it done in less than 24 hours;
▪️Build a detailed recovery strategy.

#3. Kill your own ‘dumb rules’

One of the most effective ways to create memories for your customers, amaze them and earn their loyalty is to break your own rules to favour them when it makes absolute sense to do so.
This opportunity normally arises when your rules clash with what the customer wants; they simply don’t want to play by them.

Dumb rules

‘Dumb rules’ are given birth usually by some control freak in the organization with a nonsensical purist view that a customer should behave in a certain way that serves the organizations purpose with little regard for whether or not a customer will react favourably to getting treated in the prescribed manner.

One of my favorite dumb rule stories took place at The Mirage Hotel Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. There is a wonderful deli in the casino that serves the best rueben sandwiches ever but the customer friendliness of their policies sucks.
My wife and I show up late one night and asked the hostess for a booth and were told flatly that our request was not possible since it was their policy to offer booths only for parties of 6 or more.
I get that management wanted to maximize the check value from these specific seats, but in this case the store was empty save my wife and me! Maximizing revenue beyond the two of us was an impossibility!

In my experience the fathers and mothers of dumb rules can be found in staff type jobs whose role is to develop and implement operating procedures to govern, among other things, customer transactions. In these circumstances the objective is to meet internal requirements like efficiency and productivity rather than ensuring rules enhanced the customer experience.

And, unfortunately where customers are not considered the prime target for the rule or policy they become collateral damage in the rule’s application; they are mistreated and tell hundreds of other people how crummy the organization’s service is.

But there is a way to both have your cake and eat it to. You can both realize efficiency gains by applying the rule to the masses and bending or breaking the rule for those few customers who don’t accept it and push back on you.

The apply-the-rule scenario gets you the productivity gains you want from the majority of your customers who are ok with it; the bend-or-break-the-rule scenario avoids the pain of an unpleasant customer encounter and impresses them and makes them more loyal to your organization.

When apply-the-rule is winning

You’re in loyalty do-do when apply-the-rule is winning. If your frontline employees spend a great deal of their time enforcing the rules, policies and procedures of your organization and, as a result, are constantly saying ‘no’ to your customers nothing good comes of it — loyalty is threatened — and employee engagement is in jeopardy because being a rule enforcer is not a rewarding role to play in any job.

Job frustration can eventually lead to employees finding another organization where day to day existence isn’t so painful.

Employees can’t create delightful moments for customers when they are constantly trying to get someone to tow the line on something they don’t agree with — empower your frontline to ‘say yes’

I’m not suggesting that a frontline person should break a rule that would violate the law, but they should have permission to bend-or-break an internal policy that has no significant negative long term consequences for the organization.

When you test your policies

Rules and policies impact people differently; each person will react to an enforce-the-rule encounter in a different way; some will be ok with having to comply with the rule while others will go postal.

One way to anticipate how your customers will likely respond to one of your rules is to ask them before it is implemented. Unfortunately I’ve never witnessed a process where detailed due diligence is done to brainstorm the negative reactions that customers may have to a particular rule or policy that is being considered, but there should be.

Given that customers are likely to respond to a rule in ways we never imagined, the only solution (if you want to protect and grow customer loyalty) is empower your frontline people to bend one of your standardized rules, policies or procedures when the customer needs a different treatment; when their needs are quite reasonable but out-of-bounds to what the policy manual says.

To those who think that empowering frontline folks will result in them giving away the shop, stop worrying. They won’t

In my experience, empowering them to use their judgment and determine when and how a rule should be bent-or-broken actually produces a greater degree of rule enforcement as they typically reserve flexible treatment for those customers who truly need it.

Once given the latitude to apply flexibility to policy enforcement, they actually take a more active role in advocating the company’s position behind the policy.

When frontline people are allowed to control the bend-or-break process, the organization is rewarded by a customer who is blown away by how they are being treated and how humane the organization is. And they tell others how truly great you are.

The solution: the dumb rule committee

How do you go about identifying and killing these ugly loyalty threateners?

Go ask your frontline what dumb rules they are constantly having to deal with. They know them but do you have the courage to listen and do something about them?

I created dumb rules committees in the operations areas of my organization and appointed a dumb rules leader for each committee whose responsibility it was to seek out and destroy (or otherwise modify) rules that made no sense to customers and drove them crazy.

Fun was had by all over this concept. Everyone, particularly the frontline, welcomed this initiative; they all were passionate about the purpose; we made real progress.

We had contests among the committees to see who could come up with the most dumb rules to kill, and we celebrated the winners. The committees were expected to not only identify rules, policies and procedures that annoyed customers, they were also charged with the responsibility of eradicating them by taking whatever action was necessary to get it done.

My role and that of my senior leaders was to remove any roadblocks preventing the committees from getting a rule dealt with.

Customer-friendly dumb rules

Certain rules are required by law or regulatory governance. First of all do your due diligence to make sure that the claim is real and not the posturing of a champion who doesn’t want their rule or policy removed. If the rule is necessary, however, then at least look for ways to make it customer friendly.

And reconsider how the rule is enforced with a customer; what communications strategy is used. Is it friendly and helpful or is it demanding and intimidating?
Take the time to design the customer communications content to minimize an adverse reaction; it’s not always possible but it is worth considered doing nevertheless.

If you are able to expunge even 20% of the dumb rules you have in your organization, your customers will reward you with their loyalty and your reputation will soon attract new customers as well.

#4. Bend your own rules; empower your frontline to ‘say yes’

Even if you think you’ve purged all the dumb rules in your organization, I guarantee there will be some residual ones that some customers will find and it’s crucial you have a strategy to deal with them.

You can’t amaze customers if your frontline is enforcing rules all the time; telling them what they can and can’t do to comply with the company’s position.
Saying NO! constantly does nothing to endear someone to you; it’s a de-dazzling event that won’t encourage any sense of loyalty.

Allow your customer contact people — and systems — a certain amount of flexibility to bend the rules when it makes sense to do what the customer wants.
Most organizations limit this type of empowerment; they are unwilling to trust that their people will make sensible decisions that will favour the customer and the company.

When a rule is bent for a customer, they feel listened to, respected, honoured — and amazed, when it occurs.

An amazed customer is a loyal customer who provides a never ending stream of sales to an organization and pulls their friends with them

To recap

If you want to amaze your customers and have them for life, do these 4 things:

▪️Hire people who love people;
▪️Recover from your service screw-ups with a SURPRISE! factor;
▪️Eliminate the dumb rules in your organization;
▪️Allow customer facing employees to bend your rules and ‘say yes’ most of the time.

Cheers
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series.

• Posted 8.21.17 at 05:37 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

February 20, 2017

Why real passion is key to delivering amazing service

Source: Unsplash

Why real passion is key to delivering amazing service.

Many organizations today declare they are in the business of providing memorable customer experiences; they believe that delivering an amazing experience to their customers is the vital strategy to gain a competitive advantage over others in their markets.

And there are a plethora of opinions of how to build a customer experience (CX) strategy, for example this is one of many takes on it.

If customer experience refers to the sum of every interaction a customer has with an organization, both pre and post sale, the customer experience strategy defines the actionable plans in place to deliver a positive, meaningful experience across those interactions.

And a number of inputs to building the strategy are mentioned including competitive insights, customer research, customer behaviour facts, market data, and the service strategy of the organization which is necessary to define context for the CX piece of it.

This sounds like a complicated (and expensive) piece of work for any organization who believes a ‘meaningful experience’ is the key to building a successful and sustainable service organization.

I don’t think it’s all that complicated; I believe there is a special ingredient to mixing a brew of remarkable customer experiences. And I don’t think extensive studies of your competitors, customer behaviour and the market are required to do it.

In fact I believe you can have a mediocre service strategy and know absolutely nothing about what your competitors are doing in the CX space and still deliver mind-blowing experiences for your customers.

Experiences happen with engagement — I believe that at its most fundamental level, experiences in any organization are created when an employee engages with a (potential) customer.

There are other moments of engagement that are facilitated by technology. People calling into a call center who have to engage with an Integrated Voice Response (IVR) system, who are on a website and need to use the chatbot, search or cart-building functions all come face-to-face with a piece of technology substituting for a human.

DIY is becoming a larger piece of the human-organization pie and has been given a major boost by COVID-19 which stripped most organizations of employees and has created a burgeoning online transaction business.

Technology facilitated interactions are on the rise, no question about it and that are likely to continue to increase in the future.

The critical ingredient in human-to-human contact is emotion.

But I believe, however, that they should be architected from the human-human connection in any event — how humans engage with other humans should be the benchmark for designing technology-human engagement.

Of course this is a very contentious point because the main driver behind technology-human substitution is cost reduction.
Technology is used not to create human based experiences for people but to replicate what people do at lower costs. And the problem has always been that costs are reduced but it drags the CX down with it.

Emotion defines the experience — So what is at the heart of the human-human moment that influences the experience?

If the moment is replete with descriptors like caring, politeness, respect, understanding, patience, responsiveness, trust, interest, feelings, and empathy on the part of the moment provider chances are the customer will have an amazing experience in contrast with a moment characterized by words such as frustration, anger, dominated, ignored and unfulfilled.

Emotion is the common denominator of both delightful and painful moments so the challenge for any organization who covets the most amazing CX provider award is to architect every moment with emotion.

Every customer moment must be infused with emotion.

What emotion element(s) should be infused into call center moment, the server moment in a restaurant, the complaint-handler moment, the website chatbot moment, the website buy moment, the website search moment (one of the most frustrating moments for me personally), and the product return moment?

Emotion is the strategy — If customer moments are infused with emotion, it really doesn’t matter what your competitors are doing or what the textbooks say about consumer behaviour. Your customer will love the experience.
Nor does it matter what the strategy of the organization says.

Emotion-infused moments will keep customers committed to you; they’ll come back for more moments and will encourage their friends and family to do so as well.

A vague imperfect strategy fuelled with emotion moments will deliver amazingness involuntarily.

If you want a mind-blowing CX strategy, focus on emotion and nothing else. It should be a single driving force behind your recruitment strategy, not just for positions that interact with customers, but also for positions that design technology moments.

I would recruit someone for a web design position, for example, who gets emotion infusion over someone who doesn’t have the perspective of trying to make a technology moment as human as possible.

Final thought — be careful of those who suggest that you need to pump up your customer service training program as a solution.
The fact is that you can’t train someone to deliver customer emotion-moments; honest emotion and care for their fellow humans can’t be taught.

It’s something that people are born with and the challenge is to find more of them than your competitors.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 2.20.17 at 05:44 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

December 5, 2016

6 powerful ways startups can launch with great customer service

Source: Unsplash

6 powerful ways startups can launch with great customer service.

Most startups have other priorities when they launch.

Creating interest in their idea, searching for investors and filing any required patents occupy most of the founders’ time at the get-go.

Thinking about creating a customer service culture doesn’t command much attention, if any at all.

It should.

Wrapped around your relevant and compelling idea, building a sustaining enterprise from the beginning must include developing a culture that exists to serve your customers as one of your priorities.

Here’s an approach to begin your service journey without overloading your resources and placing your other critical priorities in jeopardy.

▪️Well before you are overwhelmed with drumming up interest for your launch, take a day and develop a service strategy  for your business.

This strategy is intended to not only emphasize the handful of service elements you intend to focus on (to give you a competitive advantage) but also to define the context for the culture you want.

Avoid aspirational declarations in your strategy. “We will exceed customer expectations” or “We intend to provide excellent customer service” are not particularly helpful in understanding precisely how you intend to service your customers differently than your competitors.

▪️Use the service strategy as your recruitment template; to define the type of skills, experience and attitude in every person you intend hire; not just service employees.

Everyone in the enterprise from CEO to service clerk - must innately possess the service mentality. If you don’t hire with a serving criteria, a strong service culture will escape you.

▪️Establish your own internal language based on the elements of your service strategy. Have everyone ‘talk the same talk’ about service.

For example I insisted we use ‘promises kept’ as the phrase we used to describe meeting a commitment made to a customer. A promise is personal and was intended to engender personal accountability to the customer.

▪️Take a moment to recognize service heroes regardless of whether you have 2 or 3 employees at the startup stage or more. The important thing is to build this recognition “system” early on so it becomes part of ‘the way you do things around here’ - culture.

Bring customers in to have a conversation with the team. It’s extremely important to do this early and to communicate ‘we walk with customers’.

▪️When it is necessary to establish rules and policies to govern how you intend to transact with customers, test your intentions with customers. You need to be easy to do business with and separate your startup from the herd.

Customers will not only give you honest feedback they will be impressed that you asked for their input (because no other organization does).

▪️Even before you have a single customer, decide on what needs to be measured (using you service strategy) and set up a simple system to measure how customers perceive the service they receive from you.

Be the ONLY startup with the foresight to begin crafting a service culture before you open your doors for business.

Waiting is a mistake.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 12.5.16 at 05:50 am by Roy Osing
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