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Ask Your Employees

Employees can be your single best resource for suggesting changes to the way things are done. Since they are the front line contact with customers, employees often know a lot about how customers view your business. And employees often have excellent ideas about how to make processes better and more efficient. Try to create an environment where employees are expected to make suggestions about improving things. Avoid suggestion boxes or do away with them since they rarely are effective and they imply that not everyone should participate in making the business better. Actively ask employees for their input about what is working and what isn't working. And ask them to provide suggestions about how they would make those things that aren't working better. It is important to act on or respond to all suggestions. Obviously not all suggestions will be appropriate, but employees need to understand why their suggestions won't work. For the suggestions that are appropriate, take action and include employees in the process of implementing changes when possible. The important thing to keep in mind is that employees represent a wealth of potential ideas about how to make your business or work unit better.

What Needs Managed

It it critical that managers and owners understand in great detail how the various aspects of their business interrelate and how they impact the bottom line. In too many organizations, the managers are more focused on reacting than they are on being proactive in terms of managing the variables that affect the bottom line. In broad terms the most important variables for any business are people, processes, strategy and culture. These four variables should be focused on daily by all managers and if managed effectively will have a tremendous impact on bottom line results. Hiring, training and promoting people that fit their jobs well, creating and managing processes that are efficient, developing and implementing sound goals and strategies and instilling a customer-driven and high accountability culture are all vital to the long-term viability of a business.

Here are some simple tips for improving your listening skills

Try hard not to think about your response until the other person is done speaking. Trying to from your response while the other person is still talking means you probably won't hear everything you need to hear.

Don't talk prematurely or interrupt. Allow the other person to complete their thoughts before jumping in. Interrupting a train of thought can often get the conversation off on a tangent and make it difficult to get back to what the other person wanted to say.

Concentrate carefully on what the other person is saying. Look at the other person when they are speaking. Don't thumb through papers or appear distracted. Carefully listen to every word.
Listen without bias. Before forming an opinion, let the other person explain their position. If you allow past experience or your opinion about the other person to bias your ability to listen effectively, what they are saying and what you interpret them to be saying could be entirely different.

Never assume you know what the other person meant if the wording is unclear. If someone says that they need something "as soon as possible" does that mean now, tomorrow, next week or some other time? If you assume that it means one thing and the person meant another, you have a problem. Ask what they specifically mean when they make a comment that is unclear.
Listen actively by nodding your head to acknowledge, making good eye contact, saying things like "I understand" or "that's interesting", for example. This tells the other person you are listening attentively. Be careful not to overdo in terms of nodding or making acknowledging remarks, however.

• Clarify by repeating in your own words when necessary what you understood the other person to say.

• Practice your listening skills every day. You will be amazed at how much more effective your communication will be when you assume the responsibility of becoming an excellent listener.

• One of the biggest obstacles in business is ineffective listening. Don't let it negatively impact your performance.
  

Exercise:
1. Describe below an incident where ineffective listening by you, the other person or both contributed to poor communication.

2. In what ways can you improve your listening skills and how will you begin to apply those skills in your job?

Under-promise and Over-deliver

Telling customers what they want to hear rather than what they should hear is a sure way to lose them. Some employees have a terrible habit of making promises that they or their company can't keep. In a nut shell, they over-promise and then can't deliver on that promise.
There aren't many things that agitate customers more than to be told something will be done and then not have it happen. When this happens, the employee is essentially lying to the customer, or so it is perceived. There are a number of reasons that things don't get handled as promised including an inability to say no or deliver bad news, laziness, an uncaring attitude and lack of information. The first reason is at least understandable while the others are not.

A business must instill an employee discipline to serve customers at a very high level. To do this, customers need to feel that they are being told the truth. When an employee over-promises and under-delivers, the credibility of the employee and the company are negatively impacted.
A motto that some customer-oriented businesses adhere to is "under-promise and over-deliver". Simply put this means that they tell the customer the truth, are conservative in their estimates of when something will happen and work hard to deliver as promised or ahead of schedule. Unfortunately, we don't find many companies that fall into this category.

Developing a culture of this nature requires hiring the right people and instilling in them the need to gather as much information as needed before making promises to customers, to make conservative estimates of when the desired action will be completed and to work very hard to ensure that the action is delivered as promised. This requires follow up and attention to detail as well as an attitude that puts the customer first.

If your business does not have this type of culture, it's time to evaluate where there are problems and to develop a training and accountability framework for customer service performance. Your managers and supervisors must understand how to manage a culture that calls for under-promising and over-delivering. They need to be keenly aware that the life blood of your organization depends on instilling this type of culture.

Differentiate Your Business Based On Outstanding Customer Service

There is so much lip service paid to customer service that even those businesses that provide lousy customer service begin believing their own hype about how the customer comes first. The fact is that most businesses do a very poor job of serving their customers. Many have simply fooled themselves into thinking that they are doing a wonderful job of providing outstanding service. Avoid being one of those businesses.

Nothing short of outstanding customer service should be acceptable in any business. But virtually every day we run into examples of customer service that ranges from pitiful to barely acceptable. Rarely do we encounter truly outstanding service.

Outstanding customer service does just that....it stands out. The fact that most businesses are clueless when it comes to instilling a customer service culture that accepts nothing short of outstanding represents opportunity for your business. If you can master the art of serving the customer, you have the opportunity to differentiate your company, or stand out, from your competition and gain a competitive advantage.

Outstanding customer service requires several things: 1) a sincere and powerful commitment to serving customers and prospective customers at the highest possible level each and every time, 2) excellent people, 3) stringent expectations and policies regarding how customers are served along with a high level of accountability for enforcing those expectations and policies and 4) a discipline about serving customers consistently in manner that not only meets customer expectations, but often exceeds them.Achieving outstanding customer service means hard work and attention to detail as well.

In order to deliver outstanding customer service consistently, each and every facet of your business must be "fine tuned". Because each part of a business is interconnected, each has the ability to create either favorable or unfavorable impressions with customers. For example, a customer might order a product and have a great experience placing the order and receiving it on time. But they discover a billing error and deal with accounts receivable to clear it up. In doing so, the customer encounters a rude employee that is less than helpful. All of the hard work to please the customer in ordering and shipping the product is wiped out by another area of the company. We emphasize that all employees should fully understand what their roles are in providing outstanding customer service. And all employees must be held accountable for delivering it.

Outstanding customer service must become a way of life for your employees. It must be focused on and become almost a mantra with employees. They should have some healthy fear about delivering anything less than outstanding service. Hiring employees that are capable of delivering outstanding customer service is critical to your efforts. Some people simply cannot deliver outstanding service consistently. And the key here is consistency.

Once excellent employees are in place, they must be trained and retrained continuously. They must be evaluated based on, among other things, their ability to deliver outstanding customer service to both internal and external customers. An employee having a bad day is unacceptable as an excuse for delivering less than outstanding customer service. Employees must be "on" every hour of every day that they are on the job. You can't expect anything less. Customers don't care that an employee is having personal problems or isn't feeling well. They want to be served at a high level.

The success of your business is directly tied to how well customers are served. Remember that your focus should be on building value in your business. One way of doing so is to increase your customer base over time. Delivering outstanding customer service will help ensure that your base of customers does increase rather than deteriorate.

Your company should have a well conceived customer service program in place. This program clearly defines how the company will hire, how and when it will train employees in customer service and it documents procedures and clearly delineates company customer service policies. It also outlines how employees will be evaluated and how customer satisfaction will be measured. If there are incentive plans based on delivering outstanding customer service, those should be detailed in the program as well. In short, outstanding customer service won't happen without a well conceived and well managed approach to making it happen.

Take the opportunity that exists for your company to truly stand out from your competition by delivering customer service that is clearly different and better. It will make a significant difference in how customers perceive your business and what they tell others about it.

Don't Just Talk About Customer Service

There is so much lip service being paid to customer service these days with very little actually being done about it that it is almost laughable. How many organizations do you see promoting themselves as leaders in customer service or just generally bragging about how well they serve their customers? The truth is most organizations are not coming close to delivering even average customer service, let alone outstanding customer service which is what they should be striving for.

Just talking about customer service and telling your employees that they are to provide outstanding customer service is not going to affect the level of service to your customers enough to make any sort of positive difference. While some short-term buying decisions are based on price, over the long-haul customers will often base their decisions about who to buy from as much on the quality of service they receive as price. In fact, it appears that the relationship between business failure and poor customer service is dramatic. Conversely, those organizations that understand how to deliver outstanding customer service can often times overcome competitive pricing strategies by their competitors and still maintain strong gross profit margins.
Outstanding customer service is generally viewed as an added value by customers. Why? Because it is so rarely encountered that it leaves an impression when they do experience it.
Look closely at the level of customer service being delivered by your organization. It's not the perception of you and your employees that count. Rather, it is the perception of your customers that matters. Ask them how they feel about the quality of your customer service. Remember that you won't hear from many disgruntled customers. They just go away.

Do your employees really understand how to deliver outstanding customer service? Do they really understand what is expected of them? Does the company understand how to achieve outstanding customer service? Outstanding customer service stands out. It can truly help you differentiate your organization from your competition. To achieve it takes constant care and nurturing. It must be measured. Outstanding customer service needs to become a "trademark" of your company.

Hiring customer-oriented employees is the starting point for delivering outstanding customer service. Some employees will have a difficult time being customer-oriented because of their personality. Putting people with poor basic people skills in a position to deal with customers is a common mistake in the business world. Think about your own buying experiences and the people you encounter. How many really deliver outstanding service?

Look at your customer service quality objectively. Does it need work? How much work? Develop a plan for correcting deficiencies. Make outstanding customer service a part of your culture. It will pay dividends