Want to deliver customer service so good it knocks your competition out of the running? If so, you can’t leave it to happenstance. Extraordinary customer service comes from building an organizational, cultural habit: making sure great customer service feels like the norm, the expectation in your company culture, rather than an exception, a fluke.
Habit is the customer service secret that many otherwise successful organizations are missing. It’s necessary if you want to get beyond offering a pretty good level of customer service, some of the time, to offering a reliably high level of customer service almost all the time. And that’s what this article is about.
But first I have a true confession. (Don’t get too excited; it has to do with seat belts.)
Today, I didn’t use my safety belt. For about 11 seconds. I was turning my Volvo (yes) around in my driveway and consciously thought to myself, as I put the key in the ignition, “I’m going to live on the edge. I’m just in my own driveway, and it’s just for a moment.”
Let me tell you. Those 11 seconds were uncomfortable. Panicky. A poison ivy level of personal discomfort. Halfway into the maneuver, I had to break down and belt myself in after all, in order to feel all right.
Why? Because when we were kids my parents, bless them, never ever allowed a key to turn in an ignition until everyone in the car was strapped in. Didn’t matter if it was our car, a rental, a taxi, or one of those little shuttle buses. So doing the right thing in the area of safety isn’t something I get to be proud of. It’s something I can’t help doing.
Onward to customer service. Any employee, and I mean any, can rise to giving good service once in a while: Perhaps when it’s really slow, when the employee really clicks with a particular customer, when the employee is especially well rested and especially in-hungover.
But great customer service, the kind that over time makes your competition entirely irrelevant to your customers, has to happen day in and day out, and with customers who have funky attitudes, who don’t treat you like you’d prefer to be treated, who interrupt you when you are trying to make sense of conflicting priorities on very little sleep.
This is where my seat-belt theorem comes into play. Your organization needs to ooze habitual (habitually ooze?) customer service excellence. Not “some of the time, it’s OK if we do, OK if we don’t” customer service, but true customer service excellence.
While this depends first, of course, on hiring people who are appropriate to customer service, to customer facing positions and then depends on you to train and inspire employees to give extraordinary service, it depends, in the long run, on developing habit. On employees building up the habit of great customer service, by observing their leaders in the act, and by working side by side with great peers who consistently deliver great service, day in and day out. Doing it to the point that, for example, being abrupt with a guest or not helping a customer in obvious need (she’s looking at a map, for example, but you don’t offer to help her get where they’re going), feels awkward, itchy, squirm-inducing.
Habit is the customer service secret that many otherwise successful organizations are missing. It’s necessary if you want to get beyond offering a pretty good level of customer service, some of the time, to offering a reliably high level of customer service almost all the time. And that’s what this article is about.
But first I have a true confession. (Don’t get too excited; it has to do with seat belts.)
Today, I didn’t use my safety belt. For about 11 seconds. I was turning my Volvo (yes) around in my driveway and consciously thought to myself, as I put the key in the ignition, “I’m going to live on the edge. I’m just in my own driveway, and it’s just for a moment.”
Let me tell you. Those 11 seconds were uncomfortable. Panicky. A poison ivy level of personal discomfort. Halfway into the maneuver, I had to break down and belt myself in after all, in order to feel all right.
Why? Because when we were kids my parents, bless them, never ever allowed a key to turn in an ignition until everyone in the car was strapped in. Didn’t matter if it was our car, a rental, a taxi, or one of those little shuttle buses. So doing the right thing in the area of safety isn’t something I get to be proud of. It’s something I can’t help doing.
Onward to customer service. Any employee, and I mean any, can rise to giving good service once in a while: Perhaps when it’s really slow, when the employee really clicks with a particular customer, when the employee is especially well rested and especially in-hungover.
But great customer service, the kind that over time makes your competition entirely irrelevant to your customers, has to happen day in and day out, and with customers who have funky attitudes, who don’t treat you like you’d prefer to be treated, who interrupt you when you are trying to make sense of conflicting priorities on very little sleep.
This is where my seat-belt theorem comes into play. Your organization needs to ooze habitual (habitually ooze?) customer service excellence. Not “some of the time, it’s OK if we do, OK if we don’t” customer service, but true customer service excellence.
While this depends first, of course, on hiring people who are appropriate to customer service, to customer facing positions and then depends on you to train and inspire employees to give extraordinary service, it depends, in the long run, on developing habit. On employees building up the habit of great customer service, by observing their leaders in the act, and by working side by side with great peers who consistently deliver great service, day in and day out. Doing it to the point that, for example, being abrupt with a guest or not helping a customer in obvious need (she’s looking at a map, for example, but you don’t offer to help her get where they’re going), feels awkward, itchy, squirm-inducing.
If you’re lucky, these habits start long before the employee was even hired: they learned them, as I learned the seat-belt habit, from their parents. But you can’t count on that. So, as a leader, generate and reinforce the right habits by:
• Always–always–insisting employees provide the very best service: not “minimum daily requirement” service, not inoffensive service, but the best service.
• Modeling the highest level of customer service yourself as a manager.
• Surrounding your employees with only great employees, for positive peer pressure that makes it even more impossible to do things wrong. (This is why it’s sometimes better to leave a position temporarily unfilled rather than to hire someone for it who isn’t up to your organization’s level of commitment to customer service standards.)
This is the way to give extraordinary service, consistently, day in and day out, in good times and bad, easy circumstances and hard.
But here’s the problem: Sadly, habit also works in reverse. Even if you hire as carefully as possible, and train as hard as the dickens, if your employees see, at work, that an attitude of “we’re doing the customer a favor,” or “we’ll do as little as seems reasonable to avoid going out of our way,” is tolerated, that will become the habit. And it’s a hard, hard one to dig out once its roots get dug in.
Micah Solomon is a customer service consultant, company culture speaker, and author.
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