There is something symbolic about moving from December 31st to January 1st; people feel inclined to vow for a better upcoming year. It’s a time to reflect and seek improvements. It feels like a fresh start. Personally and in business, the new year gives us a chance to recalibrate and set goals. If your business deals specifically with customer service, why not take this time to improve how you approach your customer care principles?
Instead of writing out a list of resolutions, examine your customer care principles with a list of questions. Below we’ve compiled a list that will help get you started – we’re sure you’ll have your own questions to add based on the uniqueness of your business and your company’s customer care principles.
Questions to help you improve your internal customer care principles
To start off, let’s look at your internal policies. How your company is structured, the work culture, policies, and training all affect how your employees treat each other, feel about their jobs, and ultimately, how they’ll treat your customers. The questions below will serve as a useful guide to help you examine your policies.
- Do you encourage employees to come up with workplace improvements? Do you give employees a voice by offering them chances to make suggestions? Do employees feel “heard” at your company, and do you communicate to them that their opinion is valued?
- Do you have policies that help employees improve how they treat their colleagues? Do you encourage team building and foster a work environment based on collaboration and improvement?
- What does your company excel at? What are you not good at doing? How can you improve and focus on your strengths?
- What differentiates your company from your competitors? How can you set yourself apart?
- Do you actively try to instill pride in your employees for your brand, the workplace, and the internal teams?
- What policies stand in the way of delivering world class customer service? Are there barriers or obstacles that prevent you from treating your customers the way you think they should be treated?
Questions to help you improve your external customer care principles
Now let’s look at your external customer care principles. How can you improve the customer-facing interactions?
- Do you train your employees soft skills? Do you only focus on the technical aspects of the job, or do you also allocate resources that train employees on how to improve customer service, improve relationships, and solve problems?
- How is your competition’s customer service different from yours? Have you diligently studied the way they treat customers and compared their methods to yours?
- Do you actively seek out feedback from your customers? Do you look for complaints as well as praise? Complaints are a great opportunity to learn from your customers.
- What is your company’s protocol for dealing with negative customer experiences? Do you debrief your team and take each experience as a learning opportunity to improve?
- What does the customer journey map look like at your company? Have you charted it out and looked at every customer touchpoint and experience?
Revisit your customer care principles throughout the year
Writing out questions and examining how well you’re doing with your customer care principles should be an ongoing process that you revisit throughout the year. Use January to refine your questions and set goals for each quarter. Emphasize both internal and external policies that will help improve the customer care principles you practice. Take a new approach by asking yourself the tough questions – the reward is increased customer loyalty and customer satisfaction.
