Guest Blog: Two Ways to Improve Customer Service

This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post, my colleague John Smart shares reasons why your customer service may be failing. I especially like the idea of customers and employees having a sense of ownership. – Shep Hyken

If I was asked to choose the top two tips from all the ‘10 of the…’, ‘8 Ways…’, ‘The 12 absolute…’ lists, guides, and acronyms that you come across within Customer Service, I would choose:

1. Apply the message within Maya Angelou’s (American Poet, 1928-1914) quote: ‘I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’  Here lies the key to customer service: it’s how you make people ‘feel’.  We always remember good and bad customer experiences through our memory, and these recalls invoke the feelings we felt at the time.  So, to ensure a good, positive customer experience, we have to ensure that our behaviors, attitude and environment provide a pleasant experience for the customer.
2. ‘Seek first to understand, then be understood’ – Stephen R. Covey, 5^th Habit of his ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’. Ensure you know what the customer wants by understanding their perception, expectation and reality. Only having understood these can you then go on to deliver on their expectation or manage their expectation.

5 Reasons Why Your Customer Service is Failing

The 5 key areas that I have come across when speaking to clients, as well as running customer service workshops with regard to failing customer service, would be:

1. By not applying the top two tips above!
2. Becoming over complacent and not respecting your customer.
3. Not delivering, or not following up, or explaining why you couldn’t deliver.
4. Rudeness, bad manners and being unprofessional.
5. Not taking ownership of the issue, which is, leaving the customer with the feeling that they are on their own or the problem is theirs entirely. We have to remember that the keyword in customer service is ‘service’ – i.e., ‘’the action of helping or doing work for someone’.  Somehow, this message in some organizations seems to have crossed purposes in training! In some situations, you are often made to feel that the person providing the service is doing you a favor – and that you should be eternally grateful! Again, we can see how strong Maya Angelou’s message is – because this is all about how you make people feel. Showing willing and eagerness to help or just easing their mind makes their experience so much better.

In essence, the principles within the book: ‘PROUD: Achieving Customer Service Excellence’, encapsulates all the above.

John Smart is the author of ‘PROUD – Achieving Excellent Customer Service’. He is a development consultant, running his own consultancy, through which he has gained many years of customer service development and delivery within a diverse array of industries.

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors, go to customerserviceblog.com.