Corporate businesses increasingly need to adopt a customer focused culture to ensure that they remain a cut above their competitors. In today’s cut throat competitive environment, price and product features alone won’t make a company achieve differentiation.
Focusing on improved customer service is of paramount importance to gain a competitive advantage. Experiences of the customers is the new battleground where only those firms can win that embrace a culture that is focused on providing exceptional customer service.
From ensuring strategic goal alignment to establish customer service benchmarks, here are five tips that can help any company develop a strong customer focused culture.
Tips to Help You Develop Stronger Customer Focused Culture
1. Ensure Strategic Goal Alignment
Every organization creates strategic goals to chart the future goals of the business. Often, the strategic goals are profit centered with no regards to the factors that actually help in boosting profits. Very few organizations make strategic customer service goals even despite the fact that quality customer service is the cornerstone of business success.
Creating a customer focused culture requires making strategic goals relating to quality customer care. Alignment of customer service and strategic business goals can result in improved customer satisfaction. This in turn will lead to improved long term business profitability.
2. Involve Everyone in the Organization
Another important tip to adopt a customer service approach is to encourage employees to align their goals with customer service values. The management should link the incentives with the quality of customer service provided by the employee.
Every employee can be involved in the goal making process to ensure ownership of the goal—a concept that is known as Management by Objectives (MBO). The management should work together with the employee to establish, record, and track the goals. This allows the strategic customer service goals to be translated into personal goals.
3. Empower the Employees
Employees should be empowered to take decisions that are in the best interest of the customers. No customer would like to wait long to get their issues resolved. They demand instant resolution of their problems. Empowering the employees will result in quick resolution of customer’s problems. This in turn will result in improved customer satisfaction; ultimately making a positive impact on the company’s bottom-line.
4. Create Customer Service Benchmark
The penultimate advice to embrace a customer-focused culture is to create a broad customer service benchmark. You should look beyond your own company and evaluate the industry customer service benchmarks. The benchmarks should guide the employees in knowing about the level of customer service that is expected of them. It will act as a yardstick against which employee’s customer service performance will be evaluated, and rewarded.
5. Use Effective Lines of Communication
The last and most important tip to embrace a customer service culture is to make use of effective mediums of communication. Keep in mind that most customers spend a majority of time online. So, it’s important that you make use of digital communication channels to connect with them.
Make sure that the customer service personnel are able to communicate with the customers and with each other to stay on the same page. This will minimize communication errors, which will pave way for flawless customer service.