abstract

Striving for excellence in customer service to gain the competitive advantage is the keystone for the business to grow and prosper in the right direction so that it builds through repetitive sales to existing customers and referrals to potential customers. If customer service is looked at as a major business component and all customers are treated with excellence prior to the sale, during the sale, and after the sale, customer service will become a profit center that builds sales dollars to the top line and real profits to the bottom line. It is just as easy to provide really excellent customer service, as it is to deliver poor customer service that drives the customers to the competition.

The quest for customer-service excellence 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 buildup 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.

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 means rethinking and revamping the concept of customer service.

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 despite organizational roadblocks. If the company doesn’t, some other company will. This book is intended as a practical “how to” book for those of you who are interested in providing excellent customer service in all aspects of your operations by doing the right thing despite the counter pressure within your organization. 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.

Keywords

Customer service, touch points, pre-sale, during sale, post-sale, competitive advantage, striving for excellence, wow! moments, profit-center concepts, non-value-added activities, best practices, organizational operations, management, operating controls, cash conversion, organizational atmosphere, effective communications, integrated teamwork methodologies, efficient operating systems, coaching and mentoring, doing the right thing, operational quality, quality management, operational focus, maximizing results, compensation for results, learning organizations, programs for continuous change, corporate viruses and decay, revenue enhancement, cost reduction, changing the thinking, organizational crazymaking, organizational viruses, performance standards, basic business principles, stakeholders, mental models and belief systems, performance drivers, virtuous cycle, best practice structure, customer-service touch points, repetitive sales, customer referrals, quality customers, quality real customer sales, product determination, service versus selling, integrated customer service, sales function.