There is a lot of information and hype around providing customer service. Is there a simple process to follow in looking at developing a company's customer service?
Dr Ian Brooks, author of the recently published book 10 Steps to Becoming Customer Driven, answers:
If you don't know where you're going, how will
you ever get there? And how will you know you have arrived?
I have long believed that business is tough but it is not complicated. The secret to running a successful business is to have a clear understanding of what is important and what is not, and then to focus your attention, energy and resources on the most important.
As Stephen Covey once said: The main thing is to make the main thing the main thing. And the main thing in business is to have profitable customers who want to stay with you for a very long time. This is more likely to happen if you focus on four basic principles or keys to business success.
The first key is to deliver such superior customer value that your customers are so delighted they want to come back for more.
It is not enough for them to be satisfied or even happy. If you want their loyalty, they must be delighted. Specifically, you must understand what you have that your customers want so badly they are prepared to pay for it.
The second key to business success is to operate effective and efficient processes. Today, thanks to the teachings of quality management, we realise that work is a series of activities that form processes. These processes are the engine that drives your business. Since no one can out-perform a shoddy process, focusing on your processes is the most important thing after understanding the world of your customers.
The third key is to get the right people working together to do the right things. Whereas jobs are done by individual workers, processes are operated by teams because they involve a series of activities. Processes may be the engine that drives your business, but people make it happen. Getting good people doing the right things is no accident. It is the result of careful recruitment, induction, training and performance management.
These keys provide a generic job description for your workers. The job of your team leaders, managers and directors, then, is to create the environment where this can happen.
The first three keys will produce a successful business today, but I worry about tomorrow.
Since customer demands are ever increasing and since your competitors are improving all the time, the fourth key is to be constantly trying to find a better way. Through small steps and innovation, you must work to re-invent your business.
If you are doing today what you did yesterday, you have already fallen behind.
It takes at least a 20 per cent improvement on last year just to stay in the same place.
* Ian Brooks will be conducting a series of day seminars called '10 Steps to Becoming Customer Driven' put on by Executive Knowledge in Christchurch on Tuesday, September 17, Auckland on Wednesday, September 18 and Wellington on Thursday, September 19. For more information on Ian Brooks and the events go to: Executive Knowledge.
* Send Mentor questions to: ellen_read@nzherald.co.nz Answers will be provided by Business in the Community's Business Mentor Programme.
<i>Business Mentor:</i> Service happens by good design, not by good luck
There is a lot of information and hype around providing customer service. Is there a simple process to follow in looking at developing a company's customer service?
Dr Ian Brooks, author of the recently published book 10 Steps to Becoming Customer Driven, answers:
If you don't know where you're going, how will
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