People Management and Service satisfaction

by Samson A. Affiliate Promoter

It's really hard to teach an elephant to dance!

When recruiting employees to provide customer service, the process often tends to concentrate more on functional expertise, technical competence and knowledge rather than interpersonal skills. However, lack of the right attitude can drastically impact client satisfaction levels. Research has in fact shown that attitude is the most important requirement: skills and functional expertise can be taught.

Therefore in selecting the right people:

Define the critical job requirements
Develop scenario-based interviews/assessment centres to screen and select candidates
Involve multiple team members in the hiring process
Ensure evaluation is based on objective, not the subjective "Be Like Me" criteria

Developing, Motivating And Managing Your People

Even though you have hired the right people, there is still a need to orient them into the organisation's customer relationship culture and define key communication skills. In Call Centers and Technical Support departments, there is a tendency to rely on technical/functional skills and neglect interpersonal skills development. This can result in providing acceptable material service, the more tangible aspect, yet unacceptable personal service, the competitive differentiator.

Therefore to build a customer relationship culture, it is important to:

Provide training in key areas required to deliver exceptional personal service
Reinforce these skills using ongoing coaching and feedback
Measure current performance levels
Reward performance using a combination of monetary awards and non-monetary recognition

Establishing Effective Service Delivery Processes

Effective processes and procedures provide the foundation for smoothing or inhibiting the material service element of the customer interaction. Efficient service delivery systems appear transparent to the customer. Poor systems create those 'speed bumps' that necessitate personal intervention in order to satisfy the customer requirements.

The critical elements in ensuring a positive material customer experience are:

Mapping the service delivery processes
Evaluating critical success points in the process
Defining service standards and objectives for these essential points
Establishing service delivery procedures to optimise material service
Creating service level agreements to smooth internal service delivery

Building In Continuous Improvement

No matter how effective the service delivery processes, or well-trained the service deliverers, things go wrong. Products have faults. Customers get frustrated. Things slip through the cracks. The organisations that are built around managing the customer experience are able to resolve these issues effectively. This process known as "recovery" is an important differentiator in building customer loyalty.

In order to recover effectively, it is necessary to:

Actively seek customer feedback and complaints: you cannot improve if you don't know what went wrong in the first place.
Train staff how to handle customer complaints effectively using the correct mix of empathising, apologising and resolution.
Make sure that the real problem is solved, not just the symptoms.
Focus on proactive (prevention) as well as reactive (cure) problem solving.

As you can see, in order to deliver outstanding service, it is essential to build a customer relationship focused culture. The time investment can be high, but the pay-off can be enormous building long-term customer loyalty and helping to ensure business profitability.