If one of your organizational goals is to maintain a competitive edge by enhancing the customer experience, then focusing on Service Excellence could provide a comprehensive approach that could result in service, product, and profit dominance.
Focusing on Service Excellence will positively impact:
- Organizational Alignment, by forcing you to refine your organization’s definition of exceptional service. Defining service excellence starts with clarifying what exceptional customer service should look, sound, and feel like every time a customer interacts with your staff or uses your products and services.
- Employee Engagement, by forcing you to involve employees in the planning of work that affects them. Creating a culture of service excellence is something that you do with employees, not to them. Their buy-in, commitment, and active involvement all contribute to sustaining the culture for the long-term.
- Leadership Effectiveness, by forcing you to hold leaders accountable for driving excellence. No longer will leaders be allowed compromise in the quality and level of service that their staff provides. Their performance will be directly linked to sustained employee engagement, customer loyalty, quality management, and profitability.
- Overall Communication, by forcing you to increase interaction with employees through regular updates on company issues that impact their work and in soliciting their feedback on ways to improve products and services.
- Operational Excellence, by forcing you to assess service and product quality gaps, then searching for and implementing simplistic, cost-effective ways to improve without compromising the customer experience.
- Service Recovery, by forcing you to identify ways to effectively resolve the most common customer issues through process improvement and teaching employees how to handle customer issues with a high level of professionalism and finesse.
- Customer Loyalty, by forcing you to create a customer-centered work environment that enhances all key touch points that make up the customer experience. This includes improving the way we greet and interact with customers; the way we answer the telephone; the manner in which we improve processes that directly impact the customer; and our process for resolving any issues that may arise and diminish the customer experience.
- Revenue & Profitability, by forcing you to focus on a more comprehensive approach to customer service by identifying ways to create an environment that fosters service, performance, and operational excellence. Ultimately, you create a delightful customer experience that makes them more apt to recommend your products and services, continue to return, and be willing to spend more.
While these eight reasons to focus on Service Excellence may not be all inclusive, my hope is that it has ignited creative juices as you think about how you will approach creating and sustaining a culture of Service Excellence in the New Year.
