How to keep customer service on the agenda

Customer service is very important to your business, this may sound obvious, but it is often forgotten.

A company may recruit a telephone answering service or hire a call centre, then expect customer service to run itself. And the fact is, it doesn’t. Without consistent review, interest and attention, the customer service experience will degrade until management action is required.

The key to good customer service is to carry out the following activities consistently, by making them ongoing priorities and habit forming.

Keep talking about customer service so that it becomes central to your company culture. The simplest way is to keep it on your meeting agendas, and then the mindset will spread through the ranks and lead to decisions that will make a difference.

As a company, you need to stay hands-on and monitor customer service activities personally; you may like to hire a manager to oversee customer satisfaction and service. Yet you, as a company leader, should stay hands-on too. A good idea would be to visit call centres to talk with reps, answer the phones yourself for an hour a week, or visit clients personally to discuss their satisfaction.

Distribute customer service surveys and develop measurable benchmarks that you can follow. If 90% of your customers said that they were "extremely satisfied" with your customer service two months ago and that number fell to 75% this month, that tells you that you need to act. If you weren’t measuring, you would never know.

Have processes in place to assure that customer service remains an outgoing process, not just an incoming one. Your company representatives should talk to customers who recently bought from you, not wait to hear from them when something goes wrong. That makes the process proactive, not reactive, and dramatically increases overall customer satisfaction.

All your employees should be aware that they are in the customer service business and they play a critical role in pleasing customers. Talk to them about it often, enthusiastically, and personally.