After the lovely long break, I hope you’ve returned to work with renewed energy and vision to tackle all those things that you’d like to achieve this year.  With so much doom and gloom in the news about our economic climate and how we all have to do much more with less, it’s a challenge in itself to convert those negative emotions into opportunities.  But if we’re going to succeed, that’s exactly what we need to do!

As this is the case, I thought I’d help us focus on turning negatives into positives; using information that you have at your finger tips to ‘up’ your game and raise the standards for you and your team.  And for me this means focusing on your customer, both internal and external.

We regularly receive information throughout the year from our customers that we think is useful and could help us when we’ve got the time.  Well, how about using the next period to review that information and plan the changes you need to make for the year ahead?  Especially where you have information that lets you know what you can do more of, keep the same or improve.

I know that many of you will probably be doing this already, but if you’re not, why don’t you take a long hard look at your customer feedback from last year?  This means reviewing the complaints, compliments and suggestions you’ve received and show pictorially what it’s telling you?

A simple mind map will soon pull together the key points and categorise the issues that are causing pain or creating gain for your business.
You’ll be surprised at the picture it draws for you, detailing what your customers like most and least about what you do.  This information can, of course, be used in variety of ways.  What better way than to create a development plan for your people based on your customers’ needs and then share it as part of this year’s appraisal process?

When your people see you using actual case studies rather than hypothetical ones to create development for them, they know you are taking their best interests into account.  They see that you recognise that they have to manage the same types of issues on a regular basis and are wanting to give them tools and techniques to manage them more effectively or in some cases erradicate them altogether.  Feedback enables you to set relevant benchmarks. Customers love consistency in approach.  So when you and your team are able to introduce minimum standards that are achievable and wow your customers on every single transaction, it raises the positivity within the team because they get recognition on a regular basis.

We all know that customers can be generous in their feedback about what we can do better.  It may be an improvement opportunity, but in a lot of cases it will be a complaint about the level of our service received.  At the time, it may feel a bit of a drag that there’s a complaint to deal with, but customers who complain and let us know what we can do differently should actually be seen as Improvement Consultants to our business.  Not only do they tell us where we have got it wrong but they often tell us how we could make it better!

Imagine taking all this data and looking at it from the customers’ point of view.  When you understand their reasons for not wanting to buy from you again it’s much easier to fix those reasons making it simpler and more of a pleasure for customers to do business with you in the future.

However by taking this type of approach it is clear to see that this is not a one off exercise to tick the box and say it has been achieved. Customers needs and expectations are changing all the time.  According to the Harris Interactive Customer Experience Impact Report, 86% of consumers quit doing business with a company because of a bad customer experience, up from 59% four years ago. 73% of consumers end a relationship due to poor service.

Can you believe that poor customer service is currently costing UK businesses £15.3 BILLION?  And the majority of it is due to us not treating customers how they’d like to be treated.  Customers expect three key things:

• To know everything about our product/service
• To be respectful and polite
• To take ownership and responsibility of issues

These should not be difficult to achieve.

At your next team meeting when you have service issues to discuss, get the team to reflect on the type of service they like to receive and why.  Which organisations offer that type of service and what are the characteristics of their service.

Then ask the team to think down the opposite track.  When do they feel that they have poor service, what are the characteristics of it and which organisations are the biggest offenders?

You can get the team to decipher where they’d plot you as a business.  Is it with the good service or bad and why?  They may even want to design their own principles of service.  This type of approach helps them to personalise what giving good service is all about.  It also gets them to recognise some of their own traits  and gets them to ask themselves why someone else should accept a certain level of service when they wouldn’t?   And because you’ve created buy-in from all the team, it’s much easier to then link these types of behaviours to appraisals, competences etc.

Listening to customers’ calls is another way to ensure you remain ahead of your competitors.  In one company where I worked, we used this approach to restart the business.  We listened not only to calls from customers, but also to our people on the front line who told us about issues they were experiencing.  At that time, customers were finding themselves in a position where the products available to them didn’t meet their needs.  We soon realised that there were a lot of our customers in the same position and felt there must be lots of other people in exactly the same boat.  This led us to introduce an entirely new product into the market and was a really positive turning point for our business.

Your people know what issues your customers are facing as they need to deal with them on a daily basis.  Even if you just start with the top three issues that make it easier for your customers to do business with you, your people will know that you’re serious about providing a better service during 2011.  Please don’t be one of those companies who lose customers due to poor service.

I’ll leave you with a quote from James Baldwin to help you along your way ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed.  But nothing can be changed until it is faced!’