Make sure customers always win

Q: I know that customer service is vitally important to my business. But how do I go about making good customer service the way we do business?


A: No matter what you’ve heard, the customer isn’t always right. But that doesn’t mean you should be the one to tell him. A better line to live by might be, “The customer always wins,” because if the customer doesn’t win, he doesn’t come back—and then you lose!


Linda Novey-White, international customer service consultant and former SCORE director, believes you should establish a customer service standard that depends on your particular business. Is your core value that the customer always walks out of the door happy, or is it that the customer always gets the best product even if he doesn’t want to pay for it? Those core values are your customer service standards. But whatever those standards are, they should be designed to engender loyalty with each customer who comes in contact with your business.


Novey-White says, “Once you know what the standard is, you have to manage to that standard. The business owner has to be the evangelist for the customer service standard and also its chief enforcer.”


If customer service is important, it’s not enough to say so. The business owner has to be prepared to hire—and fire—based on customer service performance. Customer service should be foremost in annual evaluations, and it should be attached to measurable goals.


If you want to improve your customer service, benchmark it against others in your industry. But if you really want to vastly improve customer service, compare it to others outside of your industry. You might learn a whole new creative process for implementing customer service if you go outside of your industry.


You should be evaluating your customer service on an ongoing basis. Don’t wait until evaluation time to set an employee straight—your customers won’t wait to find someone else if they’ve been disappointed.


It’s not enough to train your employees in customer service. The reinforcement has to be ongoing. Some of the best ways to do this are to let the customer help. One hotel distributes tokens to guests and encourages them to hand the tokens out to employees who have done an exemplary job. Those tokens can later be redeemed by the employees for merchandise. Another company used evaluation cards as the basis for days off for employees who consistently rank high in customer evaluations.