I’ve been delivering Customer Service training in Adelaide so long I really get excited when I experience service excellence.

I recently received some fantastic service from a sales consultant. Their selling skills were amazing, they made me feel important, answered all my questions and convinced me that their offer would be perfect for me. I couldn’t wait to get started – I was sold! I just needed to wait out my current contract and then I could become their customer. I made contact via their website and got an email back the same day advising me that someone will contact me shortly to get the process started. A reply on the same day – I was stoked! Great service again. But that’s where it stopped. 6 days later and no contact. I finally spoke to the original sales consultant who assured me that I would be contacted that day.At the end of the day I did get a call advising it would take an additional few days to get started but they would email me the forms to start the process. You guessed it – no email!

It’s not just the product that needs to be perfect for the customer but also the service.

How can I trust this business to follow through on any requests or problems that might arise in the future? How unfortunate for this business that the effort it made to make the sale can be so easily undone by a lack of an effective Customer Service strategy. There’s the time and money spent on marketing, networking and hoping that you come across just the right person who is in need of your service and is ready to spend. Typically 94% of a business’s marketing budget is spent on getting the customer to call. You’ve done all the hard work and your prospective customer is ready. “Let me give you my money in exchange for your valuable service” – they say. A customer strategy helps to maintain customer satisfaction and retain business by having a plan in place that ensures that promises made are followed through. Too often businesses focus on providing customer service training to their frontline people without ensuring that it matches their strategy. To be effective the strategy should match the outcomes of the customer service training

It should plan:

1.         How quickly you will respond to the customer.

The faster you respond the better. If you don’t respond within 24 hours chances are your competitor has. There’s a great opportunity here to be amazing by responding within the hour.

2.            How you will handle customer complaints. Being proactive and monitoring customer feedback will help to prevent customers from complaining. 31% of unhappy customers will vent on social media. Track it and nip it in the bud as soon as possible. Respond by apologising and rectifying ASAP before it spreads too far.

3              How will you deliver the customer expectation It’s one of the biggest causes of unhappy customers. Businesses not doing what they promised they were going to do. You need to have the relevant processes and systems in place need to make sure that the service is delivered as promised to the satisfaction of the customer

4              What you want your brand to say to your customer Most businesses when asked this question say things like: We are customer focused, our customer comes first The customer is at the centre of everything we do Our quality of service is our competitive advantage.   If you’re going to make these statements, and promote them as your competitive difference then you need to back it up. In addition to having the right products, processes and systems to deliver on customer expectations you also need the right people.   Your customer service strategy needs to extend to having the right people with the right skills, knowledge, attitude and ability to deliver your planned approach to service. How will you ensure that your people continually and consistently deliver on your customer service promise? A scary statistic I came across recently is that generally:

 Customer service training only makes up 15% of all training delivered to the customer service team!

The remainder is made up on products, process, systems and policies. To truly be customer focused, the entire organisation needs to approach service in the same way. The internal service needs to match with the external service to demonstrate consistency and culture.

Find out how Training x Design helped improve an organisation’s ability to implement their customer service strategy and improve their business performance by designing and delivering a customised training solution.  Case studies: Training x Design in Action

What’s included in your customer service strategy?