Learn the Difference Between Customer Service and Customer Focus
Many people equate customer service experience and training with typical “customer contact staff” only. Available statistics appear to confirm that training these employees should be a top priority.
Data indicates that as many as 8 of 10 current customers will move to your competition if they are unhappy with their treatment. Additionally, around 70 percent of customers do not mind paying up to 13 percent more for products from companies offering superior customer service.
Great Customer Service Roadblocks
There are, however, things that inhibit even highly-trained customer service personnel from delivering quality service to customers. Author Ray Miller addressed these roadblocks and suggests ways to avoid them in his recent article, “Customer Service Versus Customer Focus,” (The Training Bank, May 2011).
Should senior management ask employees about common things that inhibit delivering outstanding customer service, they will receive answers that include the following.
- Policies, procedures, rules and regulations that are stratified and inflexible.
- Lack of staff authority to immediately resolve customer problems with a solution that addresses the issue in question.
- Unavailable help and support from other departments, more concerned with their own issues at the expense of customer needs and wishes.
- Supervisors more focused on enforcing company policies than making customers happy.
These are the most recurring complaints of direct contact customer service personnel. They are well-founded comments. For every legendary Nordstrom’s, long noted for their superior customer service experience, there are many more companies that preach, rather than deliver, outstanding service to their customers.
Customer Focus Goes Beyond Direct Contact Personnel
Customer focused strategies target both direct customer contact employees AND other departments’ staff, to help all contribute to a positive customer experience. This education emphasizes that ALL departments and employees, regardless of their primary function, have an impact, positive or negative, on company customers.
Shifting from a traditional customer service experience to more all-encompassing customer focused strategies can become a much more effective game plan. When all employees understand and comprehend their role, they realize their actions affect the “customer experience” with the company. They learn to adopt more sensitive, intelligent actions toward internal and external customers.
Customer focus strategies are particularly important for all levels of management. Expecting non-supervisory employees to display customer focus dedication, without strong management support, is an exercise in futility. Managers must unequivocally “buy into” this philosophy to achieve consistently good results.
If you, as a valued employee, become trained to commit to a favorable customer experience for all company activities, you can do so with confidence and assurance once you know that your manager is on the same page. Having this support, you can improve customer service, efficient operations and advance your company’s all important brand.
Hopefully, focused management will also recognize and address the previously noted common roadblocks to superior customer service, giving you more latitude and flexibility to deliver creative responses and solutions to customer problems. Talking the talk about delivering outstanding customer service and walking the walk to provide a wonderful customer experience are different.
This is similar to understanding the difference between customer service and customer focus. Those employers, who erroneously believe the terms are interchangeable, are often those companies that fail to identify the correlation between inflexible procedures and an unacceptable level of customer discontent.
Conversely, those companies that comprehend that implementing a customer focus policy targets all employees and drives the organization to think “customer first,” will succeed, as this focus supersedes strict rules and regulations. Inflexible procedures seem to be effective when all customer issues are identical. Unfortunately, when this happens, it may apply more to the quality/pricing of your company’s products or services more than pure customer service issues. Product, pricing or quality issues will typically bring dark times to your employer, more than a simple customer service deficiency.
The real difference between customer service and customer focus shows itself in the attitudes, actions and results implemented by the company. If you are in customer service, you should notice a wonderful change in the attitude and support of other departments when you need to have them involved in customer issue resolution.
Instead of reinforcing common roadblocks, these other departments will now help you “clear the road” to help your customer regain their happiness with and trust in your company.
If you serve in another department, you should be more attuned to the customer experience, realizing that happy customers keep buying from your employer—thereby maintaining their need for your employee services. Having management support, you can also help customer service when needed, without the fear of reprimand from other department managers for stepping outside of your job description duties and responsibilities to solve a problem.
You’ll enjoy your job more and feel good about your contribution to outstanding customer service. Having customer focused strategies ingrained in your daily activities is as rewarding for you as it is for your valued customers.
Source:
http://www.thetrainingbank.com/customer_service_versus_customer_focus_training.htm