“Customer service is not a department- it is a discipline.” If you have been in Corporate for a year. You have heard that saying. We have Customer Service Associations in various countries and across all these communities. Is Service delivery that complicated?
Are you exhausted, overwhelmed, and burdened by the vast amounts of customer data constantly bombarding your in-box and your key metric reports? The speed of business today, with gigabytes and terabytes of customer data available, is enough to consume you if you don’t learn to put it into context.
In his book Simplify: Ten Practices to Unclutter Your Soul (Tyndale Momentum 2014), Bill Hybels wisely warns that when we spend our lives doing things that keep us busy but don’t really matter, we sacrifice the things that do matter.
It’s astonishing how businesses spend so much time, money, and energy trying to understand customers. We all buy things; we’re all customers. We all know that we prefer to be treated with respect and courtesy, so why has such a commonsense gesture become a mystery to us? It’s as if customers are a different type of person altogether when we ourselves are customers.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to customer service. Certain businesses may have similarities, but each business is also unique. Your uniqueness is one of your strongest selling points to the customers you want to appeal to. This means that your approach to dealing with customers’ needs to be customized to the type of customers your business attracts. Last week I was driving, and the service promise for KFC hit me, “Get it served Hot, Fast and Easy.” That is the mantra of service delivery at KFC, once they master doing that, they can be bad au other things but they will always win.
Connecting with customers in a meaningful way doesn’t always mean doing more, but doing better at what needs to be done. Instead of always looking to add, think about what isn’t needed, then cut back. Find a way to make things simpler and then simplify. Work on creating a balance to improve the workplace and work-life balance. You’ll be amazed as you see real change in how your people think about, feel toward, and act with your customers.
Register for our Service Design Workshop. Limited space available: https://consultsudesh.com/why-self-service-works-for-atms-but-not-for/
