Best Costumer Services Practices

Excellent Customer Service: A Dozen Best Practices
“The only right way to run a company – and the most profitable way – is to saturate your company with the voice of the customer.” Richard C. Whiteley, The Forum Corporation, 1991

Introduction
In his popular book, “The Customer Driven Company,” Richard Whiteley (1991) emphasizes the theme “saturation with the voice of the customer” as the keyto ensuring excellent customer service and consequently a successful and profitable business. Failure to listen and respond to the voice of the customer causes stress, anger and frustration for millions of customers and the ultimate failure of those businesses that are not happily and intimately connected with their customers. Today, providing excellent customer service is the best strategy forany company. In the current economic environment, hundreds of businesses are failing, downsizing, or restructuring every day. Granted, businesses fail for a variety of reasons, but those companies that do not provide excellent customer service are among the first to go. This paper examines business practices that focus on meeting and exceeding the needs and expectations of the customer. The authorpresents twelve proven strategies and techniques for delivering and maintaining excellent customer service. A business that implements these best practices will enjoy significant customer service improvement over time and will develop a business culture in which employees continue to learn and use superior customer service skills.

A Dozen Best Practices
1. Drive everything in your businesswith a customer focus. If we were to operate with only one best practice, this would be it. If all decisions, all services and all products were based upon a customer focus, customer service would be excellent. In a customer driven business, management and employees remain committed to satisfying the needs and expectations of the customer. In these companies, rewards, recognition and training are allstrategies for ensuring excellent customer service. In these companies, the customer is the job or business and whatever the customer wants, needs or does provides the energy for everything else. Ask the right questions. This best practice requires that owners and employees constantly ask questions, collect, analyze and use data. Feedback from the customer is a source of constant business renewaland adjustment. As the business environment changes and as customer needs shift, continuous feedback allows a business to adjust and change accordingly. The critical question is, “What do my customers need, and how can I best provide it?” There are many ways to collect data, and every customer should be considered a source of data. Everyday conversations with customers provide a continuous flowof useful information. Employees should learn the art of asking openended questions in order to give the customer opportunities to express perceptions, attitudes and both positive and negative feelings about the business and its quality of service. Another way to collect data is the use of focus groups; these are small groups of three to seven individuals who focus on a specific issue or topic thatis of interest to the business. Focus groups may also be used to propose solutions to problems and to resolve critical issues. Written questionnaires and surveys are other techniques for collecting information. Care must be taken to ensure that questionnaires are as short as possible in order not to waste valuable customer time. Telephone surveys are another useful tool in the collection ofinformation about customer service and products. Many companies have found the use of advisory committees as another helpful tool for data gathering. The formation of a formal advisory board not only offers customers an avenue for expressing feelings, attitudes, and sharing information, it helps to create ownership for the company among the advisory board members. It

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