Creating Service Superstars

A business owner's guide to building team member's confidence, initiative and commitment - to create memorable customer experiences

Caroline Cooper

• Publisher: Naturally Loyal Publications
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780995618312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Fact #1

Outstanding service tempts customers to:

• Spend more
• Come back more
• Be confident in referring your business to others

Fact #2

Your employees are the key drivers of your customers’ experience.

In this book Caroline guides you through the stages to developing a true service culture and creating your own Service Superstars.

“ It’s the experience you create for customers that gets remembered ”

Getting your brand’s customer experience right can be the number one way to differentiate your business from your competition.

Don’t leave it to chance!

1

Why Bother

The starting point of all achievement is desire.

Napoleon Hill

When you get home from work can you normally sense what sort of mood everyone at home is in? Even when no words are spoken it’s usually pretty easy to tell. Likewise, our own moods and emotions are usually evident to others from our behaviours, body language, facial expressions and tone.

Of course it’s no different for customers. They soon pick up when team members are bored, hesitant, impatient or simply disinterested.

And this doesn’t just apply to the person they’re dealing with directly; the behaviours of anyone else in sight or within earshot can impact how the customer feels.

Irrespective of whether you’re selling products or services, in person, by phone or online, the emotions you create in your customer will always have a part to play on their buying decision: their willingness to buy at all, how quickly they buy, how much they spend, their perception of value, their readiness to buy again and their confidence to recommend you.

But sometimes your team don’t recognise just how big an impact they can have, or why it is important.

Get Committed

Before we talk about your team let’s consider what importance you place on service and the customer experience.

What does customer service mean to you? Why is it important to your business?

Exercise

Define what a great customer experience means to you and your business:

■ Take a sheet of A4 paper. Draw a line down the middle. On the left hand side head up the column “What does delivering a memorable customer experience mean to my business?”

■ List as many reasons as you can think of.

■ Now in the right hand column go back to each reason and ask yourself “What does this mean to me?”

■ Now pick your top 5 compelling reasons for devoting time to invest in managing your customer experience.

OK, so now you’re 100% bought in, but what about your team? You recognise there’s room for improvement, but you need their commitment too.

In my experience there are three common objections to any form of change to the way they serve customers:

■ But, that’s what we do already…

■ Well, we’ve always done it this way…

■ I can’t…

But, that’s what we do already…

As far as your team are concerned they think they are doing a really good job already, so any discussion on customer service standards or suggestion to make changes is seen as a criticism.

This is a common response when your expectation is to improve the standard. They may well be doing an OK job already, but you know it could be better.

I was starkly reminded of this recently when I was asked to deliver some training for the customer facing team of a property services business. The customer feedback clearly indicated there were several areas where improvements were needed to the customer experience, and these were discussed and agreed with my client.

Unfortunately when I started to speak to the team they were blissfully unaware of any of this feedback and so naturally felt they were already doing a great job. It was unsurprising then when they were resistant to any suggestion of change.

So when your team believe they are already doing a good job, start by recognising the things they’re already doing well. But be clear about what great looks like (we’ll cover this more in the next chapter), and where the gaps are.

In the case above sharing the customer feedback would have been a useful starting point to help them understand the gaps. And even if they didn’t agree with the customers’ comments, what they could not argue with were the customers’ perceptions. Which means the focus would be on what led to those perceptions, and how to change them.

You’ll need to take a sensitive approach, and help the team understand how subtle changes can make a difference to the customer’s perspective.

Well we’ve always done it this way…

Why are some people so stuck in the past and their old ways of doing things?

There’s a multitude of reasons why some are reluctant to attempt to do anything differently, even though they may recognise it’s inevitable or for the better. It’s not an unusual response to shy away from change. Whilst some might rise to the challenge you’re just as likely to have people who’ll resist anything that takes them away from their old comfortable way of doing things.

One of the first ways to overcome this is to explain the reason why. Why do things any differently. This isn’t just stating why it’s important from a company perspective, but focusing on WIIFM. i.e. What’s In It For Me; from the team’s perspective rather than yours.

Put yourself in their shoes… Will it make my job easier? Will it free up time to focus on other things that are important to me? Will it mean I get fewer complaints? Will it mean I can earn more tips? Will it make my job more enjoyable? Will it give me more pride in what I do? Will it make me more confident? Will it mean I get more recognition?

We often think the benefits are obvious. However the team will generally home in on the downsides first. More work. Something new to learn. It’s too complicated. I’m too old to change. It won’t work. We tried it before.

Of course there are business benefits too, and we don’t need to shy away from these, but sometimes they think of these as being only in the owner’s or management’s favour. What they often don’t see is the impact a healthy business can have on them: More opportunities, greater investment in the business, better equipment, improved conditions, more job security.

What are the knock-on effects of the business doing well? The local community, ...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1: Why Bother
• 2: What Great Looks Like
• 3: Walk a Mile in their Shoes
• 4: Tricks of the Trade
• 5: A Sparkling Performance
• 6: A Bad Workman Blames his Tools
• 7: A stick of rock
• 8: In summary
• About the Author