Category Archives: Customer Service

Customer Service, Leaders, Leadership, Professionals, Service Excellence, Young Professionals

Great service comes in many forms

Service is not just a traditional retail experience. Examples of service include the willingness to allow direct reports to make mistakes so that they can learn (even though you could have done the task faster and to a higher quality yourself). Cleaning up after yourself in the lunch room. Picking up rubbish in the foyer and placing it in the bin. Letting others go first through a doorway. Offering your seat to someone not as healthy as yourself when riding public transport. Listening to a colleague when they just need another human’s ear. These are all simple examples of service. Service can be everywhere and it can be nowhere. How present is service in your life?

Quote from a participant in one of our research programs.
I’ve experienced great service from my parents, from the local convenience store and the volunteers working at the drink stations in the running events that I participate in. I’ve also received great service from high class hotels. Great service is everywhere, if you’re prepared to see it!

Please feel free to add a comment to this article.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Customer Service, Gen Y, Generation Y, Leaders, Professionals, Service Excellence, Young Professionals

Great service connects customers to your busines

Service quality pioneers Zeithaml, Berry and Parasuraman (1985) identified that service quality, reduced service problems and the capacity to promptly and appropriately resolve problems when they arise are significant factors that enhance customer retention, loyalty and referrals.

The challenge here is to do these three core service activities in a cost effective manner that either meets or exceeds the real expectations of the customer. As you will read in another article this does not mean providing a ‘5 Star’ level of service when the customer is expecting a ‘2 Star’ level. It means what it says – providing the level of service expected by the customer at a fair exchange for that service.

Think about it. You are already a potential expert on good service.

“What, I’m an expert?” you might say.

A potential expert.

You spend an enormous amount of your time as a customer, whether in a retail or hospitality context, or as a customer of other colleagues while at work. You know when you receive good service, just as you know when you receive bad service. You know what good service ‘feels like’. Therefore, you also know what poor service feels like. It then follows that good service that helps people to feel good helps them to stay connected to the organisation.

Please feel free to comment on this article.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Customer Service, Leadership, Professionals, Service Excellence, What Matters

Why good service is good business

In highly competitive times it makes sense that good service is good business. Even though customers are not particularly loyal, providing great service consistently and over a long period of time makes it all the more difficult for your competitors to attract your customers away from you. While your customers will try out the competition, if they do not receive a higher and consistent standard of service than your organisation provides, then your customers will come back and be less inclined to try out the competition again.

Implicitly your customers will trust you (just as you, in turn, trust your staff). It is however, good practice to maintain a healthy tension about your customers trying out the competition. The day that you either think that you don’t have any competition, or the day that you stop providing good service on a consistent basis, is the day that your organisation will start to decline.

No job is secure. But good, consistent service increases the security of every job, every department and every organisation. Good service IS good business!

Quote from a participant in one of our research activities

“Great service actually feels good. It feels good for me, it feels good for the people I’m serving and it keeps the business humming along. To me, good service just makes sense.”

Please feel free to ask a question or to make a comment about this article.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Customer Service, Leadership, Professionals, Service Excellence, Teamwork, What Matters, What Really Matters

How ‘little ideas’ can make a BIG difference when times are tough

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Recently I had the good fortune to perform an assessment on a division of a large financial organisation for the Customer Service Institute of Australia (CSIA). As both a Senior Assessor with CSIA and through our our own OTM Service Strategy I have had the opportunity to observe many organisations who are striving to deliver great service to their customers.

More and more organisations have recognised the importance of treating their staff as their Number 1 customers (see the blog Providing Great Service Means That Your Staff Come First, Not Your Customersposted on http://studentsthatmatter.ning.com) and there is a strong link between that approach to employees and the provision of great service. I also observed a number of terrific little practices that have produced significant cost savings and efficiencies for the organisation’s with whom I have been working.

The team from the financial organisation that I assessed last week shared a couple of significant results from implementing ‘little ideas’. Last year the staff in the call centre were required to complete eight weeks of overtime leading up to the end of financial year. With 120 staff in the Call Centre that creates a significant salary overhead. This year only one weekend of overtime was required to complete the same amount of work with the same number of staff.

A serious question is, “How did they create such a remarkable efficiency improvement?”.

There were two ‘little ideas’ that drive the response to this question. The first was that over the past year they have created a work allocation system that more evenly distributes work, including ensuring that the work performed by the more senior staff in ‘coaching’ other staff is recorded as ‘real work’ for the coaches. In the past this work was not recorded as ‘real work’ for the more experienced staff so their system included a dis-incentive for experienced staff to share their knowledge. As part of a continuous improvement program where staff submit suggestions, a simple idea to change the system so that the ‘coaches’ were recognised for their ‘coaching’ significantly changed the behaviour of those people. The resultant behavioural change also meant that less experienced staff started to access knowledge far more quickly than they had previously been able to access existing knowledge. The result was that new staff were more quickly gaining the right knowledge at the right time which enabled them to become more efficient in their work.

The second ‘little idea’ that has caused a major efficiency improvement for the team was as simple as pressing a button. Through the continuous improvement program that the Call Centre has created for its staff, one of the team members noticed that each of the 120 computers in the Call Centre took five minutes to ‘boot up’ at the start of each day. There are a number of security firewalls that cause the slow boot-up time but these are considered necessary by the institution for security purposes. One of the staff who arrived early every morning decided that while her computer was ‘booting up’ she would spend the five minutes walking around and pressing buttons until all the computers were activated, rather than staring blankly at her screen.

This meant that when the other staff arrived all they had to do was log in and they could commence work immediately. If you do the math and multiply 119 computers by 5 minutes, by 5 days by 50 weeks you will discover that it adds up to over 14.3 days of extra productivity over the course of a year. Two little ideas, one big saving.

The key factor in these examples is that the organisation has created a culture where submitting ideas is considered normal. I was also shown a number of ideas that have ‘not grown legs and won’t be implemented’ and management is happy about that. From their perspective if two little ideas each year can produce such a significant benefit, then the system is working above expectations!

Another interesting perspective on this story is the way that a downturn creates innovation, if you let it. While I wasn’t provided a statistic from this organisation to support what I am about to say, my suspicion is that there a number of people still working in the call centre who might not have their jobs if the efficiency improvements had not occured. When you consider the human impact that losing your job in a downturn can create, that is a significant benefit not only for the organisation but the staff as well.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com