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Whole Company Customer Focus
Everyone today is talking about customer care. It is becoming more and more important in business success, and it is the critical factor in gaining the competitive edge. Yet many customer are still unhappy about the service they receive.
Developing an Outstanding Customer Care culture is a strategic ‘weapon’ in creating sustainable competitive advantage for your organisation.
Over 70% of the workforce today are employed in the service industry. Many of these have received little or no training in customer care. As a result, companies are not achieving their full potential in terms of sales growth and success. Everyone in the organisation has a part to play in making sure customers are happy and coming back for more. Getting everyone tuned in to outstanding customer care can make a powerful difference to your companies performance.
There are 3 ways to increase business:
Sell to more customers;
Sell more to your present customers;
Increase the frequency of customer transactions.
Outstanding Customer Care is a learnable system and philosophy to build long term customer loyalty.
Management’s role in managing the customer experience with the organisation is at the very front end of successful marketing. Even so, many managers are inclined to let the interactions with the customer just ‘happen’ rather than manage them.
Owners, managers, supervisors and employees at all levels in any organisation should start to think about their jobs as Customer Service jobs. The bottom line of managing the customer’s experience is this:
If you are not directly dealing with the customer yourself, your job is to support and provide back-up to the person who is serving the customer.
Customers are not just external – the people within the organisation who receive your work are your internal customers. They might be sitting next to you, or in another department or building. You support them, and they in turn support their own customers – and so on down the line. The person who finally makes the contact with the external customer can only provide outstanding customer care if that chain of internal customer care is supportive.
The job of the internal customer is to support the person who meets the external customer. Making a sale is easy. Developing a long-term relationship with a satisfied customer, who comes back again and again, requires outstanding customer care. At the Moment of Impression, YOU are the Company
MOMENTS OF IMPRESSION
Service is the first thing a new customer notices when he or she comes into contact with an organisation. Before he or she has had a chance to see the product or even to enquire about the price, the potential prospect has probably encountered a salesperson, a receptionist, a telephonist or some other representative of the company. This initial contact can turn out to be a Moment of Impression. This point of contact often determines whether or not this customer will ever do business with your company again.
CUSTOMER CARE IS A PRODUCT
In many organisations in Ireland, customer service is given lip-service. “The Customer is King” or “What can we do for you?” are well worn slogans, yet from the customer’s point of view, the reality in many organisations is often quite different. Rude, inefficient or incompetent employees can project the attitude “customers are a hassle”. Outstanding customer care is a product in its own right. It’s production, quality and delivery must be managed just as other aspects of an organisation are managed effectively and efficiently.
MANAGEMENT EMPOWERMENT
There is a vital link between the achievement of outstanding customer care and organisational development. Many management groups have attempted to improve customer relations without considering their organisation’s ability to deal with the necessary change. They need to learn a whole new way of empowering themselves and their staff. One 10 minute jog will never make you fit. However, a daily 10 minute jog over a period of time will. Similarly, one short stab at the training process will not create this new culture. In fact, often times it creates scepticism and cynicism as to how it doesn’t work. Gearing the whole operation to work towards a new customer climate requires as much management empowerment as it does training front-line people on customer techniques.
A TOP-DOWN COMMITMENT
To really succeed, the pursuit of outstanding customer care must become an undying obsession. It requires every single person in the organisation to focus their energies and enthusiasm on not just getting it right, but on constantly improving it. Customer care therefore becomes a dominating theme throughout the organisation; continually debated, continually reviewed, continually challenged – and its successes continually celebrated. This obsession must be top-down.
THE PROCEDURES
Procedures and systems should be designed to make things easy for the customer. Your procedures should be based on your long term vision, or culture, and should help your people deliver your product to the customer. So, are your procedures really putting the customer first? Consider such things as parking, signs, payment systems, sales methods, ordering and delivery systems etc.
Here are some challenges for you to consider in regard to managing outstanding customer care:
- Are you 100% sure that what you are selling is totally compatible with what the customer wants to buy? Again, look at both your product and your service.
- Service can only be a competitive weapon if it’s outstanding. Good service is just not good enough. Recognise and manage the Moments of Impression where your internal and external customers meet each other.
- Every person in the organisation should be directly or indirectly working towards helping to serve the customer. In other words, everyone has a customer. Your customers are people who depend on you to get their job done.
- Visible management has to come from the top with managers at every level practising what they preach
- Outstanding service is a product. A service is produced at the point of delivery. Unlike other products, it cannot be stockpiled in advance, or held in readiness.
- If improperly performed, a service cannot be ‘recalled’ and ‘repaired’ or ‘replaced’. If it cannot be repeated, the apologies are the only means of recourse for customer satisfaction.
- The person receiving the service is merely left with a feeling; the value of the service is internal with his or her personal experience.
- Managing the customers experience with the organisation then, is managing the Moments of Impression on the Journey of Outstanding Customer Care.
The OCC Management Model
Managing Outstanding Customer Care provides a framework with which to achieve exceptional and consistent customer care. OCC occurs when the expectations of the customer are surpassed by their experience. It represents the sum total of the customer’s experience.
There are five elements in the OCC Management Model:
1 The Customer
2 The Service Culture
3 The People
4 The Product
5 The Procedures and System
To manage outstanding customer care, you must develop a philosophy of how you conduct business internally and externally – all of the time. Your organisation’s culture, products, procedures and people must be aligned to serve your Customers in an exceptional manner.
An outstanding customer care culture will differentiate your organisation from your competitors. More than any other factor, it takes dedicated effort and a long period of time to develop. This culture is difficult to create and develop, but virtually impossible to replicate or copy.
You can steal away my people, you can steal my products, but you will find it virtually impossible to copy my culture. The customer’s ultimate decision to do business with your organisation is consciously or unconsciously dependent on the combination of these factors.
You recruit, train and support competent people, you have quality products that are promoted effectively, you have procedures and systems that ensure best practice customer care. Ultimately, your customer decides on the combination of factors appropriate to him or her.
The Managing Outstanding Customer (MOCC) model provides a framework with which you can view the sum total of your customer’s experiences.
Did you find this information useful to your situation?
If so, Tell us Your Story by sending it at info@centurymanagement.ie
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