What is Good Customer Service?
Customer Service Insights
What is good customer service? “The customer comes first” is a well-known business adage, but does everyone in your organisation understand exactly how to incorporate this truism into their own work?
Even if they do, isolated customer service alone isn’t good enough. Organisations need excellent customer service, both throughout their operations, and as a fundamental principle of their culture. A customer focus has to be at the very heart of the organisation if its customers are to consistently experience excellent service.
At Apex Leadership we try to combine current thinking with best practice to help you find better ways to manage your customer service.
Ask your customers! Often the simple, straight forward actions are the most powerful. If you want to know what is good customer service in your organisation, then ASK.
What is Good Customer Service? Start with the Customer
When your managers are dealing with the many pressing challenges they face each day, it’s all too easy for them to become distant from your customers.
Yet customers are not only the lifeblood of any organisation, they also provide some of the most influential insights your organisation will ever find.
Apex Leadership has developed Customer Service Insight workshops to help you explore ways to make the most of this critical resource.
For example, putting customers first might result in better customer satisfaction, but can such a policy contribute to more efficient services, even in difficult financial circumstances? We think so, but it’s far more likely to be effective when organisations ensure customers are involved in the creation and delivery of services.
This view contrasts with approaches often found in the public sector “…that treat people as passive recipients of services designed and delivered by someone else”. Instead it builds on best practice starting to emerge in the public sector, emphasising “…that the people who use the service have assets which can improve those services, rather than simply needs which must be met.” (Co-production: an emerging evidence base for Adult Social Care Transformation. SCIE Research Briefing 2009).
What is Good Customer Service? Engage and Energise People
As important as the need to engage your customers is the need to engage and energise your staff. Bringing employees and customers together to improve services is the best way to realise better, more efficient services.
However, there can be tensions in such an approach and managers need to find ways to capitalise on potential, avoid or minimize tensions, and realise practical ways to implement cost-effective solutions.
Our Customer Service Insight workshops will help you find ways to do this, assisting you to engage and energise your staff. Without them, even the most meaningful customer service culture, policies or practices will be ineffective.