Customer Perspective! (is all that matters) Part II

Customer Perspective (is all that matters) (part two) By Randy L. Snyder

This is a continuation of Part one published on 10/26. We touched upon self service as opposed to full service businesses and what the customer expects and what the customer receives. The critical factor for a retailer is to include their service offering to the customer as a condition of their business, include it in their mission statement and reinforce that pledge at the store or business level! The following are some of the aspects of customer services promised and customer perspective regarding those promises!

Depending on the type of business, there are many practices in customer service that will make the service consistent and valuable from the customer’s perspective Here are a few of them:

Fulfilling and keeping promises
Services that “add value” to the purchase of the business must be clearly communicated through advertising and other means utilized. Subsequently those “promises” must be kept day in and day out, via the website, on the phone and in person. Employee training, evaluations and empowerment all should play a part in enabling the employees to uphold those promises!

Empower all employees to act wholly on the customer’s behalf
The bottom line is your employees realistically represent your “brand” from the customer’s perception. The associates on the “front line” must be the endorsers, cheerleaders, evangelists, spokespeople and advertisers for your company. They are capable of making or breaking the customer’s service experience. Their interactions with customers are critical to building a lifelong relationship or breaking the possibility of that relationship with them!

Front line employee rewards and remuneration must be tied into customer satisfaction
Providing the tools to enable good customer service is not enough to assure that it is followed through without fail. Rewarding customer service, therefore, becomes tantamount to the success of customer service expectations set forth by the “top management.” Positive customer feedback must be recognized and rewarded for individual accomplishment as well as continuous and random kudos! Outstanding achievement in customer service can be incorporated as part of the salary increase or remuneration system of the front line employees. “ROTS” or “Recognition On The Spot” for customer praise and commendation should be a common practice. Conversely “COTS” or“Correction On The Spot” (without embarrassment to customers and offenders) must also be commonplace in a quintessential service based business!

Listening and responding to customer feedback
The organizations best known for outstanding customer service have systems in
place for continuous customer feedback. Feedback can be gleaned through customer comment “hot line” phone numbers (posted at strategic places in the business), written surveys or, as previously mentioned, focus groups and drop down menus on the home page website encouraging “easy” customer feedback! The best companies make sure their top management is having a one on one conversation with at least one recent client on a weekly basis. Feedback should be taken seriously, but must stop short of reacting spontaneously to every comment. The customer isn’t always right whereby it pays to listen sincerely with thoughtfulness and based on input and clearly thought out logic, make decisions as to necessary actions.

This piece is very extensive and requires a “follow up” or Part three! Please check in next week for the final part of Customer Perspective (all that matters!)

Randy Snyder is a weekly contributor to Salesheads and specializes in retail specialty operations. He has written training programs for national chains and franchise offerings for three chains and has over 35 years experience with three national retailers! He can be contacted at rsnyder921@ATT.NET or (p) 828 625 4932.