Superior Customer Service System: Your Competitive Advantage

What gives a business the competitive advantage?

The secret is providing top-notch customer service.

When your service is better than the competition, profits keep rolling in.

Think of your experience as a customer.  Have you ever been frustrated with dysfunctional telephone technology that features such customer annoyances like voice mail systems with frustratingly lengthy menu options?  What about the caller-hold features with maddening distorted and loud elevator music punctuated by commercial messages?  And then to add insult to injury, when a real person eventually answers the call, they have little knowledge about the company’s products and no power to solve your problems or fix what is wrong.

How do you provide unfailing top-notch customer service?

You adhere to a system that provides consistent customer satisfaction.

When designing a system for customer service excellence, keep the following in mind.

Characteristics of a superior customer service system

The system focuses on your customer

Your goal should be to satisfy the needs of customers and potential customers.  Walk in your customer’s shoes.  What problems are your customers experiencing?  Which is the best system to address those problems?  What kind of service delivery system would please you?

Your products or services as accessible

Design a system that opens the way for customers to do business with you.  Analyze your existing system.  Remove obstacles that prevent  customers from easily and conveniently doing business with you.

You are responsive

Design a service delivery system that is based on your customers’ needs, desires and expectations.  Make an effort to know your customers as if they were family members.  Their loyalty to you is based on your ability to respond appropriately to their needs.

Provide customers with accurate information

Consistently providing accurate information is crucial. This is especially relevant when it comes to technical aspects of products and information about warrantees, price, delivery, billings, and so on.

Provide an integrated system

Customers should be able to obtain all of the information they need from one source within your company.  It is exasperating when customers have to approach several people in your organization to be able to get the service or products they want.

Design a user friendly system

The process that the customer follows to access your company’s services should be friendly, uncomplicated, and accessible.  Make it as easy as possible for them to make the right decision.

Speed is crucial

Customer service delivery systems should provide assistance to customers quickly.  Customers perceive speedy help as excellence.

A customer service system does not just belong to the customer service department.  It is everyone’s business.  In developing a customer service system, it is absolutely necessary to involve everyone in the company.

11 reasons why we procrastinate

Procrastination is putting off tasks that you can do today.

Confucius says:  Do not do today what you can do tomorrow.

In running a business, this is a very sad state of affairs!  The results:

  • Missing opportunities to get new clients and build relationships
  • Customer dissatisfaction
  • Missing deadlines
  • Missing out chances to take your business to the next level
  • Less profit (if you’re lucky enough to even make a profit while procrastinating!)

A blog post on how not to lose employment states: “Making up lame excuses, even when there may be the slightest reality in it, will never justify the work undone.”

Do you procrastinate?

  • Do you often wait until the last minute to start a project?
  • Do you often put off making a decision about something?
  • Are you waiting for “the right time” to make that dreaded phone call, confront a lazy employee, or to prepare for your sales presentation?

Procrastination leaves us with an uneasy feeling of doom somewhere in the future.  Our productivity levels are impacted, because we cannot focus on the tasks at hand, knowing there is something we should do but we are avoiding.  Yet at some time or other, we are all guilty of procrastinating.

We know that procrastination is something to avoid, so why do we procrastinate?

Some reasons we procrastinate:

  • We feel overwhelmed (often because of an overload of information/details)
  • We get distracted
  • We think the task is more difficult than it is
  • We think the task will take more time than it does
  • Fear of success. If you complete it successfully, will you be able to keep up the momentum?
  • Fear of failure.  What if it is not good enough?
  • We’d rather be doing something else.
  • We hope if we wait long enough, the problem will go away.  The project will be cancelled, the employee will suddenly become productive, etc.
  • We want to do it perfectly.
  • We don’t want to assume responsibility.  After all, if I don’t do something, I cannot be criticised for it, can I?
  • We claim to enjoy the last-minute adrenaline rush.  We claim to thrive under pressure.

Can you identify with any of the above reasons?  Are there additional reasons you procrastinate?  Please share them with us below!