Customer Service Excellence: Making It a Culture
There are times when dealing with people seem to be the hardest. However, customer service excellence should be made a culture rather than a requirement in order to handle such situations better.
While reading thru the daily news, one would sometimes stumble across some really interesting articles and one of it that struck me as a reader, was about making excellent customer service a culture. Often so, the personnel in any organization, especially those in the service industry view service excellence as a requirement and a performance indicator rather than an act in itself. Fast-food personnel are nice because they fear that one of the customers amongst the lot may actually be a disguised officer from the headquarters. Education consultants pick the phone within two rings and open the conversation with a wonderful line, “Good afternoon sir, this is XYZ education consultants, and how may I assist you?” Why? It is simply because the boss will occasionally call up the centre, just to see how quickly and polite the staff responds to phone calls. What prevents a waiter from raising his voice to a fussy patron is simply the fear of losing his job.
There is no doubt that customer service is indeed the most challenging field ever, because people are simply unpredictable. But as long as the personnel on duty does not make peace with nature of the job, and responds just because it is a job requirement and a performance indicator, then he or she may not last or even love the very job which is done. This will lead to negative stress, dissatisfaction and even alcohol dependency just to cope with the pressures of the job.
Therefore, treat customer service as a culture, make it a norm and serve customers well because you want to, not because it is required, and the rest will fall into place. It is never an easy thing to follow just like learning a new culture, and as for this case, ‘Customer Service Excellence’ it is indeed something worthwhile to pick up. Try smiling to all without the manager reminding you to do so, go the extra mile for the customers; if it is a bank, automatically waive annual charges for credit cards without letting customers call up for it; if it is a hotel, don’t wait for the customers to ask about special promotions, make it a habit to tell them – make it your culture! Implementing of a culture as such has to start from the top. It requires great leadership and somebody who would champion the very cause itself.
Source: The Star
