When I receive terrible service, I often think to myself “how hard would it have been to…..” Often that sentence ends with common sense things like “be polite”, “take your Ipod earbuds out when I was talking,” or “learn a little about the product before you tried to sell it to me.”
Fortunately, I sober up to remember the words of Voltaire who suggested “common sense isn’t so common.”
When it comes to helping your staff offer uncommon, common sense solutions to service, where should you begin?
Annually, research done by Convergys (which looks at what customer’s want from service in different parts of the world) offers fairly consistent insights into the most fertile ground for service improvement. The results of the 2010 US survey are found below:
The data is clear! If you want to pick the “low-hanging fruit” of service excellence, help your staff meet the customer’s needs on the first visit and work on solving the customer’s problem the first time it presents.
Take a moment to think about situations where a customer is most likely to try more than once to get their needs met. Those situations become your prime opportunities for training and service elevation!
