For Customer Service That Flows, Look Upstream

I was visiting a local workplace for a team-building discussion when one of the customer-care line workers described their job as being like “an ongoing mission of rescuing people drowning in the river.” A seasoned supervisor summoned up the “Parable of the River” as he commented, “Perhaps we should go upstream and see who is throwing them in.”

With the recent weather this is easily envisioned. For those of us who understand that amazing customer service is vital to our thriving in the business world, this story rings particularly true.

It takes 12 or more good customer service experiences to overcome a single bad one. On average, dissatisfied customers tell 10-16 people about their negative experience. It costs five times as much to attract a new customer than it costs to keep an existing one. Satisfaction is not loyalty. Of customers that switch to a competitor, up to 90% say that they were satisfied before making the switch.* It does not take an efficiency expert to see where our energy should be focused.

With this focus on delivering exceptional customer service to our current customers, our goals are always to improve the four Rs*:

• Retention
• Referrals
• Reputation
• Revenue

These are the measures of health in our company. These meaningful, positive, sometimes healing interactions are also beneficial to relationship between the customer and the individual employee. There are measurable positive psychological and physiological consequences for employees engaged in positive interactions with customers. This stuff is contagious! Win – Win – Win anybody?

In our customer service classes, one of my favorite exercises is exploring the great customer service experiences we have all had. Right now, you are probably smiling just thinking of good customer service you’ve experienced. People just get excited about how a problem was resolved, how they felt heard, how someone went out of their way to make things right. And we love being on both sides of these positive and healing interactions.

How do we create a culture that consistently ‘looks upstream’? Great customer service grows out of a culture of engaged employees – the people that have ownership of the positive outcomes in each interaction. But employee engagement doesn’t “just happen.” We cannot bring our employees from a place of ‘life stinks’ to ‘life is great’ in a day. In the movies, it might seem that it takes about two hours to go from hopeless to amazing. Here in the real world, however, we must lead our employees step-by-step, toward greater ownership of building and sustaining positive relationships.

Here’s what I recommend:

• Listen to your employees around the water cooler. Is theirs a language of hopelessness or ambivalence? Or is it the language of engagement.
• Teach Customer Service Skills – we are not all born with this talent
• Improve recognition programs and tie employees into the success of the company.
• Talk with employers who are improving their empowerment culture. There are specific exciting things any workplace can achieve. Learn how to link engagement and stellar service to customer loyalty.
• Keep looking upstream

Join the Customer Service classes in Eugene (February 8 & 9) and Wilsonville (February 14 & 15) to learn more from Bill about creating a culture that “looks upstream.”

*AchieveGlobal –Reaching for Stellar Service