All staff, whether the CEO or the lowliest paid employee in the organisation, have a high sense of job satisfaction when they are able to serve their customers properly. When systems & processes exist to support the passion of people, great service can flow through an organisation.

The satisfaction that comes from serving people results from the positive relationship that staff feel with an organisation when they are supported in serving their customers. Positive staff relationships result in improved service. In turn, this type of relationship results in a positively reinforcing virtuous cycle that generates great service. In this sense, it is absolutely vital that systems & processes support staff in building positive relationships with clients, customers and stakeholders. Without this support delivering great service and staff job satisfaction fall through the floor.

How well do systems & processes support staff to deliver great service in your organisation?

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Relationship employees work harder and smarter. They care about the business, its future, its destiny. The business becomes their business. (Leonard L Berry)

The American Express Global Customer Barometer has highlighted the importance of being easy to complain to, especially in places like Australia.

The Australian figures, second to Mexico, highlighted that 86% of Australians will cease doing business with an organisation after a bad service experience. Yet the majority of these Australians will not tell the organisation about their experience. Rather, they will tell their social network, especially if asked. The research reveals that the reason for this behaviour is that Australians find organisations notoriously hard to complain to. So instead they simply switch and tell their friends.

What is interesting is that approximately one in two of these same Australians are willing to give an organisation a second chance, especially if they have previously had good service experiences with that organisation. The issue is that after the second chance, the Australians will simply ‘disappear’ as customers, especially if there is a viable alternative that is available to them.

The pure economics of the above statistics highlight that it is good business to increase complaints. If an organisation were to become ‘easy’ to complain to, that same organisation would have more of a chance to ‘recover’ the customer and maintain a positive relationship with them and stop them from leaving. In simple terms this means that the company ensures that future expenditure from this customer will remain with them.

We are fortunate to live in a world where a customer complaint can be made to a social network and, if you are easy to complain to, that complaints will be heard even though it wasn’t said directly to your organisation. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter where the complaint is made, it matters that it is heard and acted upon.

As an example I recently had a poor service experience about an organisation. I ‘tweeted’ that I was going to write a blog about my experience, which I did the following day. Within eight hours of posting my blog I was contacted by a representative of the company asking for more details and wanting to know how they could resolve my issue for me. Within a couple of days a resolution for my poor experience had been created and I have remained a client of that organisation.

I had no idea that the company had set up (due to a recommendation from a teenage casual contact centre staff member) a ‘twitter watch’ and a ‘blog watch’ to look for complaints (and positive comments) so that they could fix them as quickly as possible.

It is in this manner that an increase in customer complaints should be seen as a positive measure rather than a negative one. Unfortunately it is my experience that most companies see increased complaints as a poor result rather than a positive one. Alas, most companies are poor to complain to because they don’t want their complaints metrics to rise. Silly, isn’t it!

How easy is your organisation to complain to and what are some examples of how this is done?

Gary Ryan has led service excellence award winning teams in multiple categories and is a co-creator of the OTM Service Strategy.

Over many years we have experimented and developed our own model for service excellence. Our model includes six re-enforcing elements. Like any re-enforcing model, when performed correctly the model creates a virtuous cycle (things get better and better).

On the flip side, if any of the elements are missing or not performed correctly, the model generates a vicious cycle, that is things get worse and worse.

The six elements of our model include Understanding Expectations, Service Standards, Develop & Recruit, Listen, Measure & Respond and Recognise, Reward & Celebrate. Each element includes a series of sub-elements, the contents of which provide the detail for implementing each of the six core elements.

At the highest level the model itself is a story.

In order to best serve your customers you need to understand their expectations. Once their expectations are understood the organisation can create appropriate service standards that will give the organisations the best possible chance to meet and/or exceed the expectations of its customers.

Existing staff need to be developed so that they have the capacity to meet/exceed customer expectations and the organisations recruitment processes musty give it the best possible chance to attract appropriate people to the organisation.

Everyone must listen. Management need to listen to staff, staff to management, everyone to their stakeholders, colleague to colleague, department to department and everyone to their customers.

The organisation must then be able to measure how it is performing against its service standards and be able to swiftly respond if it discovers that it is off course.

Finally, the organisation as a whole must be excellent at recognising, rewarding and celebrating great service. A culture that celebrates great service will re-enforce the importance of understanding expectations and the cycle continues.

The OTM Service Strategy is supported by a 50 point assessment tool that can be used to asses an organisation’s current practice of service excellence.

Please feel free to comment on this article or to share your approach to providing service excellence on a consistent basis.