Creating Great Customer Service

Herbert M. Sancianco

• Publisher: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
• ISBN:
  9789712729188
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Customer Relations
• Index: Business

This book is a great and practical guide in developing a company's customer service program from scratch.

In some cases, there may be a need to improve on an existing one that is deficient in many ways. It will help a company—large or small—to determine how their customer service program should be developed to keep customers happy and satisfied.

The most important adage and the only adage is the customer comes first, whatever the business, the customer comes first.

– Kerry Stokes, a successful and multiawarded
Australian businessman and chairman of Seven
Network, one of the largest broadcasting companies in
Australia

An excellent customer service equates to a memorable and positive customer experience—a happy customer. There is no other way of defining or describing what it is truly all about.

Nowadays and particularly during harsh economic times, where a greater number of customers are basically living a conservative lifestyle, the challenge is even greater to continually win their business so that you can continue to be commercially viable and profitable. At best, a company with a good program in place will be able to survive the hard times and be stronger than others when the good times return.

I truly believe in the saying that your best customers are your best salesmen. This is what rumor marketing is basically anchored on. Happy customers will be the first ones who will always recommend to friends, relatives, and business associates a brand they like the most. They will be key in progressively building your brand equity—your customer loyalty base—in a highly cost effective manner.

Customer service is a key support function to the marketing effort in business development and its image building proposition in the long term. It cannot be clearly and visibly translated in advertising as a way of convincing the target market to favorably consider patronizing a product or service in a 30-second television commercial or a full-page print advertisement. Very few companies are in fact able to practice what they say in their advertisements.

One can tangibly measure the success of a customer service program through the following barometers:

• Written commendations
• Business stability during low-selling periods and difficult business conditions
• Business performance and profitability
• Awards recognition

The three types of customer service program are:

• Starting program—refers to the creation of a formal customer service program for a corporate start-up or where an existing company has now recognized the need to organize one as pressure from the target market has dictated the need to do so.
• Continuing program—refers to an existing program in place that may be in good working order and achieves the customer service goals of the company within itself and its customers.
• Revitalized program—refers to a current program that may have some deficiencies and thus has a need to be rehabilitated in order that it may be attuned to the existing corporate business environment and competitive pressures for its commercial survival or relaunch.

So how do you create a good baseline customer service program—continue an already good one or revitalize one that is in existence?

The following is an ideal process to consider:

Step 1: Assessment

A good program first requires an external and internal assessment of the company’s present service paradigm. An independent market research study is advised for a starting program or for one that is already operating. In spite of that, data reference can be sourced from an ongoing in-house customer satisfaction feedback program.

External Survey

Hire a marketing service or research agency to conduct a mystery shopper program. Do not attempt to mount one if you do not have the experience to do so. Those who scrimp on this by doing a survey by themselves may be asking the wrong questions or making the wrong observations because of the bias factor.

A field team representing your target market description will execute the mystery shopper program. They will visit your establishment and pretend to be a window shopper or a real buyer. Others will call it a mystery guest program in the case of a hotel or hospital, a mystery diner for a food-service company or a mystery passenger for an airline or cruise line.

The mystery team can either be an individual or a pair working together. They will implement the research protocol that is developed for this purpose and visit your store during a peak and/or slow business period so as to establish a database for each study attribute.

The mystery shopper will be very observant and sensitive to what is going on during a visit. There is now a version where the field researcher has a hidden camera that will visually record the experience if the study will require a time-sensitive analysis.

A rating form is developed beforehand so that the field teams can formalize a score for each study attribute. The information generated from the study will let you know what is wrong in your customer contact process.

The baseline study attributes being rated are the following:

• Reception refers to what occurs the moment the field researcher enters the establishment, that is, the meet-and-greet factor, and how the store staffer introduces himself to the field researcher.
• Decorum refers to how the store staffer professionally interacts with the field researcher—friendly, warm, snobbish, passive, overwhelming.
• Dress code and grooming refers to how the field researcher views the attendant staff’s “presentability” relative to how the office uniform is worn and how the staffer is properly groomed (i.e. hair and makeup), which will establish the “likability” of the person to the customer.
• Handling refers to how the attendant staff member helps the field researcher in moving around the selling area, selecting an item that may be purchased, how the sales presentation is conducted and closed, and how objections are handled. In a hotel, this will involve the front desk team during a guest’s check-in process.
• Ambiance refers to how the field researcher views the store’s physical arrangement, its décor and “the shopping feel” of the place—pleasant, cool, wide, comfortable, happy.

There can also be added attributes to this short list relative to the research goals of the study. You can create your own list of attributes based on what you want the study to look into given your business model and paradigm.

Aside from a mystery shopper program, a company can opt to undertake the traditional quantitative and/or qualitative research study where it can also learn about itself from another approach.

A quantitative study shall enable a company to statistically learn its top-of-mind (unaided) recall position compared with its rivals. A second attribute is the aided recall where a list of brand names (product or corporate related) are mentioned by the interviewer, and where the respondents shall register their acknowledgment with a simple “yes” or “no” answer. It shall also be able to learn how its target market “feels” about them (their attitude) and sees them from afar (their image).

A qualitative study, on the other hand, shall provide deep insights into the target market’s sensory perception of the company where its customer service attribute is concerned among several query points.

Being able to do this, the information that will be generated will enable the company to start a database. If the satisfaction rating that the establishment garners will always be high, it can be sure that its repeat business opportunity will be strong, and its satisfied customers will voluntarily endorse the product or company to others for a first purchase.

Internal Survey

Conduct a climate study. This is an internal survey that establishes and determines the service attitude of the staff relative to their departmental functions and how they presently relate with each other for a customer service mindset.

This will be a collaborated project between the human resource and marketing departments where the former should take the lead role. If the HR and marketing function heads are not equipped to do this nor have the time to do so, it is best to hire a management consultant or third-party service company with the expertise.

This is likewise recommended for small companies operating under a central management system where the business owner or the general manager makes almost all decisions in the business. In fact, if a company operates under this paradigm, and its business is threatened for success due to the customer service issue, it is time it conducts a full management audit.

Management consultants should do the management audit so that an unbiased report can be achieved. This audit will determine the present issues associated with a central management operating system which results in a weak business performance. The audit will likewise provide the remedial measures that need to be undertaken to correct the company’s operating deficiencies, and relaunch itself to a more successful business outlook.

This management audit will replace the climate study proposition.

Where a climate study can be done, the following are the guidelines in successfully conducting one.

Phase One
Secondary Data Sourcing And Assessment—Department Operations Manual/Staff Performance Evaluation Forms

Establishing how a company will generally and specifically operate is important to clearly guide all the employees—managers and baseline staff—so that it can avoid operational conflict and imbibe the spirit of teamwork. Department managers can lead their teams according to the “house rules” (the objective platform) versus leadership by personality (the subjective platform).

Phase Two
Primary Data Generation—Employee Survey

The survey shall look into the following:

• Staff understanding and acceptance of the company’s MISSION, VISION, idS statements (assuming there is one that exists)
• Understanding the company’s definition of what ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Customer Service is a Corporate Way of Life
• The Contact Points of Customer Service
• Causes and Consequences of a Bad Customer Service
• The Customer is King: Make the Right Moves
• Characteristics of Great Customer Service
• The Ambiance for a Great Customer Experience
• Creating an Excellent Customer Service Program
• Quantifying Business Loss Due to Poor Customer Service
• Program Continuity
• Bibliography