As Al Pacino once said in the great film “Any Given Sunday” “You find out life is all about inches”.  One of the greatest motivational speeches ever heard in a movie. I listen to it every day in order to make sure I am up and focused on doing the right things at the right times, let’s face it we are never going to do it all 100% of the time but the more we concentrate on the inches that make a difference to our business the more successful we will be.

Today’s Blog is about the inches and miles within Customer Service and some of my experiences

Let’s start by looking at our businesses and what differentiates your business from the rest, well if you’re anything like me you are in a crowded marketplace and the only thing that I can do to separate me from my competition is to continually challenge myself to do things better.  I did this right from the very inception of Aquarius Contact Centres, in looking at what we could improve in people’s expectations and experience of a Telephone answering service/Contact Centre. So we decided to attract a different calibre of person we needed to build in flexibility into their working environment and thus we chose the direction of home workers. We quickly found that there is an army of people out there that have been forgotten about who have so much to give to a company and what’s more they appreciate the fact that you have given them the opportunity to work for you (Something not quite right there, especially in my industry).

So we gave them training we got ownership all of these buzz words but basically we empowered them to give good customer service and right from the start we built the culture of trying to catch them doing something good and praised them for it.

Every day we look at what we can do to go that extra mile and through continual monitoring of the customer experience we look at where we fell down and what could improve upon.

However from my experience if we have needed to overhaul a process to improve Service Delivery then we do it in small measurable chunks, more commonly known for the purpose of this blog as Inches, we don’t go in all guns blazing and change the world in a day, you can be sure you will be doing it all again in a week or a months’ time all over again. We take time to understand what we want to achieve, get buy in from our people and make sure that what we are trying to achieve matches with your customers’ expectations.

So what do people want from a customer service experience?

This is what some of our customers customers said to us –

                “I like to hear a friendly voice and someone who understands my situation.”

                “I want to be treated as a human being.

                Make me feel welcome.

                Don’t make me feel like I’m not causing a fuss.

                I want me and my money are treated with respect.

                Please keep your promises, just do what you say you are going to do.

                Don’t argue with me.

Not rocket science is it? What  do you need to do to make sure you keep your customers happy and make sure they come back and if you’re really lucky they recommend you to their friends!

Make sure you select the right people in the first place, don’t try and fit a square peg into a round hole.

                Make sure your staff are well trained and knowledgeable.

                Keep good records of conversations, payments, deliveries etc.

Always use the person’s name when in discussions, make sure it’s the right name and it has been spelt correctly.

Don’t use Email contact forms as a cop out or a cost reduction, as you can be sure it will cost you in the long run.

Lastly and most importantly LISTEN, don’t argue and always try and create a Win Win situation.

So on any given Sunday you can find me in the office looking spending a few minutes looking at where we go next and planning it inch by inch, lets finish where we started with a quote from Al Pacino

” That's a team, gentlemen

and either we heal now, as a team,

or we will die as individuals.

That's football guys.

That's all it is.

Now, whattaya gonna do?”