The natural human tendency to think we are more than what we actually are is dangerous when it comes to being customer service focused.
You may not be as customer service focused as you think you are. Everyone knows the importance of customer service. We may preach customer service and think that our people, our team, and our organizations are customer centric, but there’s a natural human tendency to think ourselves more than what we truly are.
- Just because you can shoot a basketball, doesn’t make you a basketball player.
- Just because you can cook a meal, doesn’t make you chef.
- Just because you keep a budget, doesn’t make you a financial wizard.
Just because you think customer service, does’t make you customer service focused.
Much of our daily customer service work is distributed across a number of projects and focused on complete many different tasks. Each one of these contributes in some part to the overall strategic goal of the organization. So when you step back and break down the tasks you are performing each day, how are they contributing to your customer service mission? It’s more than just knowing what is good customer service. Are you really contributing to developing exceptional customer service experiences? Are you actually satisfying customer relationship needs?
Often times when we honestly review our daily actions we’ll find that many of them had little overall effect on real customer service. We fill our calendar with meetings and can check off a number of boxes on our to-do list, but if we were to poll our customers, would they say that these contributed to a better customer service experience?
Unleash the power of exceptional customer service experiences
Until we learn to identify the most positive customer relationship building tasks and focus on filling our to-do lists with than with other administrative duties, we’ll never see the full power of exceptional customer relationships within our organizations. It takes more than just regular customer service training. We have to learn to constantly and consistently review our behaviors, preferences, expectations, and workplace rituals and center those on activities that create the most positive customer service experience.
Too often as we build new teams and join new organizations, even though we set out to raise the bar of customer service, we simply revert to doing the same things that have been done before.
Lack of bottom-line impact from customer experience isn’t the fault of the experience, but the practitioner
Many organizations today dismiss customer service and customer experience as ineffective at driving the bottom line. We set high goals for developing customer experiences, but then set out by performing the same customer-neutral tasks that have been done before. The result is the same level of customer engagement that we’ve seen in the past.
Take a look at the typical behaviors of those with whom you work. What are the typical choices and decisions that are made when your people work with customers. How do you manage your customer contact channels and what level of attention to you give to general customer feedback and the experience that takes place during typical customer interactions. It may surprise you how little influence your “culture of customer” actually is being translated into every day customer action.
Don’t be discouraged in customer service well-doing
The key is not to be discouraged at this revealing self-examination. Think of it as therapy. In order to REALLY take a step in the right direction, you have to determine which direction you need to go. Revealing the weaknesses in customer focus implementation is part of the process of becoming service-focused aware. The more light you shine on the true nature of your customer service practices, the clearer the direction you need to go becomes.
As the path to great customer service become more clear to you, and as you begin to better understand the nature of your service-based actions, the greater the ability to connect your practices to the customer service vision will be.
WinTheCustomer. is a premier customer service management blog. Flavio is a featured Customer Service blogger. Successful organizations embrace, live by, and innovate in awesome customer service, amazing customer experience, unique customer interaction and customer delight.