Introduction
Your employees will treat your customers the way you treat your employees. If you treat your employees like intelligent, conscientious, committed, loyal adults, that’s the way they’ll treat customers. And treating staff that way starts with crystal clear performance standards.
Customer Service Is A consequence Not An Objective
Outstanding, flawless customer service occurs as a result of other activities. It’s a consequence. You can turn blue in the face setting customer service goals. But if they’re not linked to employee performance standards, well …. expect to turn very blue with frustration.
Meeting Expectations Is The Key
What do your customers expect from you? Do you know? Are you sure? Have you asked them? Until you know for sure, how can you sensibly set performance standards for employees? Why bother to set performance standards for employees, unless they lead to total customer satisfaction?
A Few Essentials
To firmly establish the link between employee performance standards and customer satisfaction you need a few things in place. You need at least
• a clearly defined target market
• systems that ensure that employees can’t fail
• a transparently effective rewards/incentive system.
Many managers chase customer satisfaction without so much as a clearly defined target market. They’re disappointed when their efforts don’t result in delighted customers.
Standards And Procedures
“But we have procedures for customer service“. If that’s what you’re thinking, think again. You can have all the procedures you like to try to ensure that you have truly delighted customers. If the procedures aren’t supported by crystal clear employee performance standards, you won’t have the delighted customers you’re seeking.
The Customer Service Reality
You can make the best widgets and provide a level of customer service that’s vastly superior to your competitors. That’s not enough. The reality is that unless the customer perceives that your widgets are the best available, it doesn’t matter how good you or an army of “independent industry judges” think your widgets are. The same applies to service. And how can employees know what customers expect if you don’t?
What To Do
Talk to your customers. Find out what they expect. And, by the way, ignore staff “gut feeling”, or “experience” including yours. Find out what pleases customers most and what irks them most about dealing with your company. Then write specific performance standards for every step of the process involved in giving customers what they expect every time.
By the way, that process may commence long before the customer and an employee have any direct contact. For example, you can only have a guaranteed 24 hour turnaround on repairs and replacement if you have an effective and reliable warehousing and delivery system with clear standards. And you can’t produce flawless widgets without specifying how “flawless” will be measured.
Conclusion
Crystal clear employee and team performance standards are the foundation of so many areas of successful small-medium business. Customer service is such an area. Until you make the link, don’t expect to have delighted customers.
Couldnt agree more with that, very attractive article