Here are my Ten Top Tips for creating a Customer Service Culture:
- Have a vision and values for your business that are thoroughly bought into by everyone, and involve your customers and staff in developing the vision and values. If your vision and values are decided by the CEO or the Board, they are likely to be the vision and values of the CEO or the Board, not the business as a whole.
- Ensure that everyone in the business is fully aware of the vision and values. This does not just mean having the ‘V&V’ on everyone’s email signature, it means that behaviours change and everything you do is referred back to your vision and values.
- Everyone in the business attends a motivational and interactive induction where they are welcomed to the business and made to feel valued from Day One. This means everyone – new senior managers and directors should not ‘dip out’ of induction because they have ‘more important things to do’ or ‘have to hit the ground running’. Have a Director or the CEO give a personal welcome to all new employees.
- Every business has customers, and every business should have a service specification, or a ‘standard’. Everyone in the business should understand the standard and know what their role is in achieving it. This is not just for front line staff – support functions should know what impact their actions, or lack of them, have on external customer service.
- Everyone in the business should spend some quality time on the front line as part of their induction, and should keep in touch with reality by having regular time working with the customer-facing staff. This includes senior managers, Directors and especially people who think what goes on at the ‘coalface’ is nothing to do with them!
- Ensure that communication in the organisation is truly two-way. That means you have to have effective communication from the front line to your senior team as well as the other way round.
- Establish a culture where people are praised for doing the right thing, and provided with feedback and coaching if they get something wrong. If you are in a business where senior managers are shouted and sworn at by Directors, that culture will find its way to the front line and everyone will be looking over their shoulder making sure their manager is happy, rather than ensuring their customers are satisfied.
- Make sure that everyone in the business has a regular opportunity to tell their manager how great they are. These sessions are sometimes referred to as Performance Reviews.
- If your business takes 25% or more of its weekly revenue over the weekend, make sure there are some experienced people around to take responsibility when it is busy.
- Never believe that you are ‘there’ when it comes to customer service, because there is always room for improvement, especially in terms of the support and training provided to front line staff.
I worked in an organisation that tried hard to operate like this in the 1990’s. It was a pleasure to get up and go to work in the morning!
Excellent suggestions Graham. Do you have any thoughts on maintaining a cooperative and collegial atmosphere within a hierarchy which has very distinctive power and remuneration levels?
Gordon,
Many thanks for the feedback and the question.
I used to think that the inverted triangle, where the ‘hierarchy’ sat at the bottom of the triangle and the customer at the top, worked, but now I accept that there needs to be a mixture of direction from the top and support from ‘beneath’. I never heard of a structure where support was adequately provided from the top, where people are concerned.
One of the easiest ways I know of maintaining a cooperative and collegial atmosphere is to recognise and reward people when they get things right. When I managed a team of customer service people no-one ever went home from work without being thanked for their contribution. That is so easy to do but so many managers and supervisors forget to do it!