The Top 5 Customer Service Mistakes Companies Make
A client recently asked, “From your observations and consulting work, what do you think are the top customer service mistakes companies make?” I thought about it and listed five organizational mistakes that I feel are at the foundation of most service issues:
- Not clearly defining what the customer experience is supposed to be.
- Designing processes for the company’s convenience, not the customer’s.
- Hiring the wrong people.
- Not making customer service a significant part of new-hire training as well as ongoing training.
- Tolerating poor service performance from employees at any level within the organization.
There are certainly other mistakes companies make, but these five seem to show up over and over. Any organization that successfully addresses these five mistakes will set themselves apart from ninety-five percent of the competition.
I’ll focus on each of the mistakes individually in my next five blog posts and offer solutions. In the meantime, assess your organization’s performance in the five areas and ask others to do the same. Where do you feel your organization’s greatest opportunities lie?
It’s amazing that # 4 is overlooked so much. Even though we instituted a Predictive Index model into our hiring procedures, we never incorporated a customer service aspect to our training for new bank tellers we hired.
In fairness, the role of a teller has become so incredibly fraught with operational and compliance and regulatory issues, that new tellers could literally spend 2 solid weeks reading about these issues.
When I finally gained some authority over that part of the bank, the first thing I did was to create a one hour customer service program along with an ongoing, monitored effort based on 4 very simple principles.
While we are not near perfect yet, it has made a big difference/impact, and incorporating adherence to the principles with quarterly compensation has cvertainly helped as well.
Do not overlook #4!
These are so true. And one thing that can help a business stand out in these trying times is great customer service. More companies should try it. A colleague of mine had a really good customer experience just the other day. You can read about it here http://www.allbusiness.com/11699408-1.html