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Becoming An Empowered Consumer
How many times have you said to yourself…"I just wish that company would treat me like they appreciated my business!"? For many years I trained Customer Service Reps at a large corporation. There is no doubt that it was during those years...
Catapult Your Business—How to Get Customers to Chase You to Buy from You
I was thinking about the statement:
The Small Business Administration tells us that 80% of all small businesses will not make it more than 2 years, and by 5 years 90% will have gone out of business.
If that is the case, then why does every...
Credit Card Processing: Beat the System by Passing Processing Fees to Customers
Imposing surcharges on credit card transactions is illegal, and
it will only lead to problems. The secret to beating the credit
card processing system is not charging more for credit card
sales, but instead is charging less for cash sales. It may...
Customer Service Tips
Promoters and Marketers can give these tips to their Customer service people in the hope that they will help to keep the customer satisfied. After all the hard work of selling the product or performing the service, the last thing you need happen is...
Five Hints for Surviving a Business Slump
Starting and running a home-based business has plenty of benefits and can generate a decent living quite easily, but the ride isn't always simple. When sales are slow or new customers are sparse, you don't need to throw in the towel and call it...
How To Hit The Competition Without Losing The Customer
Get over it! If you run any type of business, you're going to have competitors. Even if your product or service is a unique one, soon you'll have copycat products start surfacing. Competition is therefore just a fact of business life and one of the...
Imagine PR Like This Helping You
As the kids say, how cool is this? You’re a business, non-profit or association manager and, finally, you decide to do something positive about the behaviors of those important outside audiences of yours – behaviors that MOST affect your...
Improving Customer Service
Improving customer service starts at the top - with us owners and managers. We need to be living pictures of how we want our staff to treat customers. Having 10 plus years operating, owning and working in the food business and being a...
Learning Superior Customer Service Skills
Is customer service an empty shell, long on rhetoric but short on delivery? Does the term customer service actually mean anything, or is it a leftover expression from an era of days gone by?
Is customer service a department in your...
Top Ten Suggestions for Selecting a Real Estate Agent
In order to find a real estate broker or agent who meets your needs and makes your buying or selling experience a positive one, Century 21 Real Estate Corporation recommends you: DO NOT blindly walk into or call a neighborhood firm and...
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Who Comes First - The Customer or Employee?
The commonly held view that the customer comes first is worth a
close look. Think about the last time you received less than
satisfactory customer service. What caused it? Probably an
employee! Either directly, bad manners and a "don't care"
attitude, or by not addressing your needs - "sorry, I can't
handle that order, you'll have to call another number".
While most of our focus is rightly on customer needs, it may be
useful to first stand back and look at the needs of the
employees servicing them. Most customer complaints can probably
be traced back to the attitude or competence of an employee. It
follows then that if we have the right employees, doing the
right things, we should enhance our customer satisfaction.
Asking employees to focus on the customer when they may be
unhappy with the company is asking for trouble. I recently had a
bank help desk employee agree with me that the Internet banking
system was slow and inadequate. He later went on to tell me a
lot more about the organization and its management, all of it
unflattering!
Why do organizations let disgruntled employees loose on valuable
customers? Probably because they don't know they are
disgruntled, and maybe because no one has thought through the
consequences.
Addressing the key issues important to staff is a good starting
point. Do they feel they belong to a team which is going
somewhere? Do they know exactly what is expected of them and
receive feedback and appropriate rewards based on performance?
Do they have a future and are they growing in the way they want
to?
Once you have the basics in place to improve levels of staff
satisfaction and retention, you
can focus on the customer by
ensuring that customer service is a key result area of the jobs
that deal with them. With a small investment in time, measures
relating to customer satisfaction can be built into the
performance management system.
A useful way of looking at this is to use a systems approach,
define the inputs and the outputs, and then choose the most
useful and practical factors to measure performance against.
While measuring outputs is best, many jobs do not necessarily
control the end result of customer service or sales, so we need
to look at what they can control and measure that.
Typical inputs would be the actions taken by the employee such
as calls made, or specific behaviors such as building rapport
and handling problems. These inputs can be observed and measured
and, depending on the sales environment, you should know whether
these generally lead to more sales.
Typical outputs are more closely linked to the main objective,
which might be sales, repeat business or profit. By recruiting,
rewarding and developing the right people who can achieve
against these types of measures, improved customer satisfaction
should follow.
A free diagnostic tool for assessing how well placed your
business is for attracting and keeping the right people is
available at the website shown below with the author's details.
About the author:
Paul Phillips is a Director of Horizon Management Group; a
specialist human resource management consulting firm. He has
over 30 years experience in HR and, while based in Australia,
has worked in a number of overseas locations. www.horizonmg.com
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