Customer service is the business you’re in. Without customer service you have no business. Whether you believe your customer service is good, bad, or indifferent—it can always be improved. Outstanding customer service doesn’t need to be a cost center, but rather a profit center that develops a quality customer base that pays huge dividends in customer loyalty, repeat business, and referrals—that results in increased real profits. The purpose of this book is to enable you and your organization to achieve result-oriented customer service.
Questions that will be addressed and hopefully answered to your satisfaction include the following:
1. What is the relationship between customer service and growth and prosperity of the business—that results in the ongoing success of the business?
2. What are some successful and proven steps to help develop the ability to realistically evaluate and improve customer service?
3. How to implement effective procedures that include the customer as part of the transaction?
4. How can our company enable present and future customers to effectively do business with us?
5. What are some effective practices to effectively implement a customer service capability that allows for listening to the customer and their needs so that our company can provide what the customer needs and not what we want to sell?
6. What do I need to learn to bring the WOW! factor to the customer service delivery system?
Striving for excellence in customer service to gain the competitive advantage is a keystone for the business to grow and prosper in the right direction—to serve its customers and stakeholders so that it builds its business through repetitive sales to existing quality customers and real referrals to potential customers. If customer service is looked at as a major business component and all present and potential customers are treated with excellence prior to the sale, during the sale, and after the sale excellent customer will become a profit center that builds sales dollars to the top line and real profits to the bottom line. And other than to make money and maximize profits, customer service (and cash conversion) is the business that the growing company is really in. And it is just as easy to provide really excellent customer service, as it is to deliver poor customer service that drives your customers to the competition.
The quest for customer, service best practices with its basic principle of doing the right thing at the right time for the right customers assists in building organizations with strong customer bases and sales loyalty. Customer service is not merely a smiling “good morning” greeting and a “have a nice day” parting but an integrated system that manifests itself into all activities of the business to weld an overall customer-service organizational mentality. Every time a customer comes in contact with the company there is what we call a “touch point” and each touch point must be a Wow! moment for the customer. It is the build up of these wow moments that develops into a really excellent customer-service experience that makes the customer want to do business with you and refer your company to others. Customer-service delivery—whether pre-sale, during the sale, or post-sale—must be maintained properly at all times using the best practice for the situation. The exercise of customer-service best-practice techniques assists the company in identifying its critical problem areas and treating the cause and not the symptom of the problem.
With sensible customer-service business principles as the hallmark for the company’s quest for excellence, the company can be clear as to the direction for movement and avoid merely improving poor practices or matching competitors less than desirable practices—that is being less inefficient than competitors. Clear business principles that make sense to all levels of the organization allow the company to identify and develop the proper delivery of customer-service practices. In this manner, everyone in the organization is moving in the same desired direction and every customer becomes a quality customer. Integration with top management’s plans as to what products to sell, in what quantity, to which customers, at what time becomes the cornerstone of the company’s sales plans and customer-service delivery. No longer does the company sell whatever the customer is willing to buy, but realigns its sales and customer-service efforts to sell those products and services that the customer really needs—allowing the customer to buy what is really necessary rather than what the company wants to sell. This, of course, means rethinking the function of the sales function and revamping the concept of customer service.
Customer service used to be mainly a one-on-one proposition that is with the customer and the vendor’s representative—with the level and consistency of customer service dependent on the individual representative. However, with the complexity of today’s business environment with globalization, free trade, electronic and internet business models and the internet marketplace, outsourcing, downsizing, replaceable personnel, cost cutting, off-shore operations, and the emphasis on increased profits and earnings per share, the effect on customer service and doing business in this brave new environment has become a new challenge—that is how to maintain excellent customer service when many times the customer doesn’t have direct personal contact.
Technology Has Made It Easier to Do Business,
but Has It Made It Easier for the Customer
This book is geared to those interested in delivering really excellent customer service within a profit center concept that enables the organization to grow in the desired directions—doing the right thing the right way in spite of organizational roadblocks. Each section of the book discusses some basic business principles and best practices of customer service as to the right ways to deal with things. If you recognize yourself or your organization in any of the examples of good and not so good customer-service practices it may not be just coincidental. The viruses that are corrupting our business organizations are widespread and quite contagious. The nouveau quick fixes may be okay in the short term, but over the long haul the company better know what they are doing to recognize excellent customer service and the right thing to do to obtain the competitive advantage. If the company doesn’t, some other company will.
This book is intended as a practical “how to” book that can be used in MBA and upper-level undergraduate programs as well as for business professionals and executive development. Those of you who are interested in providing excellent customer service in all aspects of your operations by doing the right, despite the counter pressure within your organization, may also gain some insights into the inner workings of organizational crazy making and how to live with it or change it. As many businesses are struggling to be competitive, or merely to survive, this book becomes a primer or “how to” for identifying and maintaining customer-service excellence in their operations in developing a learning organization. The book can be used by individuals, groups, or departments—management and operations personnel—in business as a learning, coaching, and mentoring tool in their quest to make their delivery of customer-service operations the best possible in today’s ever changing business environment.
Excellent Customer Service
is the Key to Business Success
Wow!!!