Ten Customer and Employee Focused Ideas for National Customer Service Week

National Customer Service Week is always the first week of October. Are you doing anything special?  Here are ten customer and employee-focused ideas (and there are a lot more) that you can do during this very important week.

1. Call your best customers just to say, “Hello and thank them for their business.”  (Or maybe all of your customers.)

2. Call customers who haven’t bought from you in over a year.

3. Have someone in your company deliver a customer service training session.  Hint: Use customer service articles or ideas from business books as the topics for discussion.  Many articles can be found at www.CustomerServiceBlog.com.

4. Once a day throughout the week, distribute an article about customer service to all of your employees.  (Go to the website mentioned in #3 to get the articles.)

5. Use this week as an excuse to send out a survey to your customers to get feedback.

6. This is a good week for an annual review of your website (is it truly customer friendly) and any other processes related to customer service and sales.

7. Create a short video thanking your customers, and post it on YouTube with links from other social media sites.  Consider having as many of your employees as possible participate in the video.

8. Have a contest for employees to come up with the best customer service examples they have created for their customers (either internal or external).

9. Have a contest for employees to suggest how the company can improve customer service.

10. Don’t just focus on the outside customer.  Do something for your internal customers.  Remember my Employee Golden Rule: The best companies treat their employees the way they want their customers treated – sometimes even better.

As I reflect on the tenth strategy above, I can’t help but mention the focus on creating a culture that focuses on customers and employees.  In my book “The Amazement Revolution: Seven Strategies to Create and Amazing Customer and Employee Experience,” I discuss creating F.U.N. in the workplace. F is for fulfillment, creating a fulfilling employee experience. U for uniqueness, exploiting the unique strengths of individual employees. And N is for next, getting employees excited about what is next.  (By the way, the book will make a nice gift – for both employees and customers.)

Finally, it has always been my belief that Customer Service Week should really be every week!  Now, go out there and be amazing!

Shep Hyken is a customer service/CX expert, award-winning keynote speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. Learn more about Shep’s customer service and customer experience keynote speeches and his customer service training workshops at www.Hyken.com. Connect with Shep on LinkedIn.

(Copyright ©MMXI, Shep Hyken)