Improving Customer Service: Avoid These Common Pitfalls and Traps to Communication

Jim Clemmer is author of Firing on All Cylinders. In a recent blog entry he reinforced what I always emphasize: Communication is a key catalyst to achieving customer service excellence.

In any game plan for improvement the objective must be to make Communication into a forethought rather than the habitual afterthought.


"If you’re leading efforts to improve your team’s internal or external service/quality levels, here are seven common pitfalls and traps to your vital education and communication efforts:

Mixed Messages – internal and external marketing must be tied together. Frontline staff need to hear the same message your customers are hearing. Too often servers are the last to hear about the wonderful service/quality they’re being committed to provide.

Not Walking Your Talk – you and your management team must behave in a manner consistent with the messages being broadcast to everyone. You do the strongest internal marketing (or blocking) of the true value and priority of service/quality with your tiny, seemingly insignificant daily actions. Nothing else will convince (or turn off) today’s younger generations of workers than perceived hypocrisy.

Stale and Stalling – managers trying to build higher service/quality cultures are often frustrated with how long it takes to get the message through to those who make or break the effort. Too often – just as managers are getting tired of repeating the same messages – people on the front line are beginning to think, “Just maybe, quite possibly, they might be serious this time.” The watchwords are consistency and repetition, repetition, repetition …

Educated but Unskilled – you can give people plenty of education, information, inspiration, and awareness but if servers and support staff don’t have the skills to improve service/quality they will become frustrated and disengaged. Awareness and empowerment are useless without enablement. Everyone needs to know how to make improvements.

Bypassing Team Leaders – you can get frontline teams excited and committed to improving service/quality but their enthusiasm will be short-lived if their supervisor or team leader isn’t first brought on board and given the skills to introduce, support, coach and lead the team’s efforts. Very few service errors come from lack of motivation. Most of them are a result of the system, process, structure, or practices. These are controlled by management.

Once (or Maybe Twice) is Enough – you can’t repeat your core service/quality messages too often or in too many ways. As one manager put it, “I’ve learned that just because you think it, write it, or say it doesn’t mean employees hear it or believe it.” A CEO adds her experience; “I vastly underestimated the job. On the first go-round, all I got were glassy-eyed stares, open mouths, and sometimes passionate disagreement…establishing our new brand took a year, and even then it was not a lasting vaccination. It required booster shots.” Just like continuous improvement, education and communication is never finished. "

Customer Focus is more than Customer Service

On my website I have for years had an orgazational performance oriented Customer Focus Self Assessment. From the database I have built up, I have compared the top quartile and the other levels of self assessed organizational performance.

It is clear that the Say-Do gap between intentions/aspirations towards customer focus (Say) and various aspects of implementation (Do) is considerably wider for those organizations below the top quartile level.

What Is Customer Focus?
It is an organizational competence: Customer-Focus is an aligned whole-organization approach to customer satisfaction and service in which Leadership, Processes and People are all customer-aligned.

In broad stokes, this means that:

• Every action is shaped by a relentless commitment to meeting and exceeding its' customers expectations regarding product and service quality;
• Internal processes are constantly evaluated and improved to meet or exceed those expectations;
• Employees are aware of their role in maintaining a valued relationship with their customers.
  

Three External Performance Levels
I found an article by executive recruitment firm Egon Zehnder that identified these three externally focused performance levels of Customer Focus with which I agree.

• At low levels, one is willing to help customers by providing them with what you know you have. Gathering information about the external customer and listening to feedback represents a low level.
• At moderate levels, the perspective moves from "what does the customer need today" to "what will the customer need next." You know the customer from the inside, which means you can predict how s/he might respond to a given offering and you can anticipate future needs that one may address.
• At higher levels, one becomes proactive in shaping the customer value proposition well beyond the transactional relationship - a trusted advisor who is intertwined with the customer's decision-making processes.

High performers build complex relationships with customers and, based on their deep knowledge of the customer and marketplace in which they compete, they provide services that customers do not yet know they need. High performers' insights about customers become a source of competitive advantage for both their own company and their customer's business.

Perhaps you can identify with any of these three externally focused levels? And, if you want to really know how you stack up as an entire organization, why not take the 10 minute self assessment on my website? www.customerfocusconsult.com

What say you? Any comments or insights?