Customer focus should be at the heart of everything a company does to achieve customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Essentially there are five steps to recognizing and implementing a successful program:
1. First, we must identify who are our customers.
2. We must find out exactly what they want and what kind of services and products they want and be able to hone in on that service to meet their needs.
3. We must design our sales and service processes around the needs of the customers we have identified.
4. We must thoroughly train our employees and use whatever successful training and mentoring programs available to us.
5. We must consistently measure our service and delivery procedures and use our customers to provide the necessary feedback and improve and upgrade our processes.
From a practical point of view, the Envision 2010 Awards for Customer Excellence were awarded by Envision, a provider of workforce optimization solutions and creator of Click2Coach, a coaching team which works on performance improvement. The recipients of their 2010 Envision Excellence Awards brought some interesting information how companies can improve their customer-centricity to improve their quality and business performance or as Envision states “to think outside the box.” Winners were listed as Alaska Airlines, Delta Hotels, WestJet, and Partners Healthcare.
Delta Hotels customer service representatives trained via coach remote agents using technology to focus in on peer-to-peer coaching techniques. They have successfully worked on faster techniques to serve customers better. Delta Hotel now uses social networking on a daily basis to monitor questions and service issues.
WestJet, a Canadian airline organization has continued to work on their efficiency and effectiveness, and have relied on coaching with agent participation to improve customer service. Social media has helped the company accommodate more customer inquiries, and Twitter and Facebook helped customers during the rollover in the company’s reservation systems.
Alaska Airlines has implemented an at-home agent program where 50% of the agents are able to work from their own homes. This new innovative program has reduced the company’s real estate footprint by 32%. The work-at-home program has improved productivity, morale, and decreased absenteeism.
And finally Partners Healthcare has, according to Envision, used the coaching and developing of employee knowledge to improve the quality of interactions between employees and customers.
Can some of these suggestions work for your company?
photo credit: j.sauerzapfe
In the quest for the all mighty dollar, many companies forget they are nothing without their customers. If customers are the focus – not the dollars – the money will come. Building a customer-centric environment needs to begin on day one with new employees, as this piece (http://www.upyourservice.com/learning-library/customer-service-culture/it-pays-to-help-new-staff-start-right) suggests.