Customer Service and Satisfaction

Introduction

Who’s it for?

This is an ideal course for anyone working in sales administration management – the people who follow up the orders, who ensure the orders are processed and that customer queries and enquiries are answered quickly. The people who sit behind and support the frontline sales team. Give your business a clear competitive edge by ensuring that you provide excellence in customer service and satisfaction by taking this course.

“Yet, no customer ever perceives themselves as buying what the producer or supplier delivers. Their expectations and values are always different.” Peter Drucker

Events in the last few years have transformed the business landscape as changes have been forced on many businesses as a result of fundamental change in their marketplace and other associated pressures.

Smart businesses will be seeking an ‘edge’ over their competition trying to successfully answer the key question that all businesses must be able to answer – ‘why should customers/ clients use us rather than our competition?’ As we have covered in other sections in The Box Academy this cannot be simply down to price. This is the rocky road to oblivion for many! But it can be many other things – product superiority or uniqueness, speed of delivery and of course simple customer service and satisfaction – which is what this series is all about.

How to get your business into a situation where you can consistently deliver customer service and satisfactions with Excellence.

Our reflections in dealing with many businesses over many years illustrate to us that some companies, world class companies, companies that are built to last and thrive, continue to focus their efforts on customer satisfaction and the customer experience. At the other end of the scale, we see many companies – sadly many more than a few years ago – that have become ‘internalised’ thinking more about what matters to them and never taking the time to look at the world as the customer sees it.

Let’s provide some examples of where, despite the improvements in technology and its ability to help, customer service or the customer experience, cannot be at the forefront of the company’s mind:

The telephone answering service that provides you with six or seven numbers to ‘select’ from which then puts you through to another list. You are then told that ‘we are extremely busy – and you are in a queue’. To assist you further in planning your day they tell you that you are number 20 or 21 in the queue and that ‘WE are very busy’.
Feeling awful, you telephone your GP surgery to be responded to by an automated message dissuading you from bothering and to call 111 or attend the Accident and Emergency Department at your local hospital. If you have the strength to hold on you will hopefully talk to a receptionist who will then interrogate you before he or she decides whether you are worthy of the doctor’s time.
Your personal Accountant who has a full voicemail box and whose e mail response is ‘I am out of the office at present with no access to e mails – I will return on xxxx (six days’ time!)’.
The Solicitor who politely informs his clients by e mail that he is taking no more calls from them – you can only access him by e mail

Do you think any of these providers have really sat down and thought about these experiences from the customer/ patient/ client perspective? Have they ever put themselves in the shoes of the people at the end of their services?

But what if they did? What if the doctor said that ‘our patients call us when they are not well, they don’t want a twenty-minute wait to talk to someone – how can we fix that?’ What if the company who have spent a fortune on telephone answering facilities and services thought ‘is this what a customer or potential new customer really wants? How can we give them a much better experience when they contact us?’

Think about this for a few moments. If these businesses or services thought this way and then acted appropriately what would the effect on the end user be? ‘What a refreshing change – a company, service, person who puts ME first in their thoughts’, they might think. They might just want to use you and recommend your business to others because you are ‘different’ and put the end user first.

At the very heart of any world class company is its ability to satisfy the unconscious and perceived needs of its customer BETTER THAN ANY OTHER COMPANY DOES. This is not just doing what it is supposed to do fix cars, clean carpets, solve financial problems or legal issues or prescribe medicine – but by doing what it is not even reasonable to expect them to do and to do this time after time.

We will cover in this series what you need to do with your business to create a world class customer/ client/ patient service experience for your end users. This will fulfil the promise that your marketing needs to make to differentiate it from the competition – to ensure that you have a winning offer and deliver on it time and time again – beating the companies and organisations who are all trying to do the same thing. As a result, your customer/ client/ patient will see your business as preferentially unique – the position you need to get into!

This series will help you design, build, implement and improve your company’s fulfilment operating system, fulfilment operating training system and fulfilment management system.

It is the ability of these three systems to work together in harmony that will enable you to do for your end user what it is not even reasonable to expect you to do time after time, while, at the same time, continually improving on your performance.