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Guest Post: Top 8 Reasons Why Your Customer Service May Be Failing

This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post, my colleague John DiJulius talks about 8 reasons organizations may not be providing the customer service that they should. These are all important to creating Amazing customer experiences.  – Shep Hyken  1. Lack of Executive Sponsorship – It is a proven fact that any big initiative, project, or revolution has […]

This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post, my colleague John DiJulius talks about 8 reasons organizations may not be providing the customer service that they should. These are all important to creating Amazing customer experiences.  – Shep Hyken 

1. Lack of Executive Sponsorship – It is a proven fact that any big initiative, project, or revolution has to have the support of the senior leadership team. Otherwise, it will be considered flavor-of-the-month or management-by-bestseller. The senior leadership team has to provide the necessary resources to create long-lasting change. Customer service has to be as important as finance, sales, operations, and technology. It needs to be talked about at board meetings and strategic planning sessions, with leaders and everyone else in the company, including front-line employees.

2. No CXL – Regardless of your company’s size, someone in your organization has to be the Customer Xperience Leader, the person in charge of the Customer Experience for the entire company. I am not talking about the Customer service reps or call center. That person should not be the President, CEO or owner, but someone who reports directly to him/her.

3. No CX community – One of the most effective initiatives developed by our consulting clients is an internal Secret Agent Team, made up primarily of non-management staff, to support the Customer service initiatives and help gain momentum throughout the front-line employees.

4. No key metric – Companies need to see the impact that Customer satisfaction has on their key metric drivers (i.e., Customer retention, average ticket, re-sign rates, referrals, average contracts, frequency of visits). This demonstrates the ROI. It also allows management teams to hold employees accountable for providing a great customer experience at every level of the organization. Measurement tools can be anything from customer surveys, third-party companies that measure Customer satisfaction, and secret shoppers to statistical benchmarks. These provide a benchmark to measure the impact of the new systems. As well as to determine whether they are being consistently executed. 

5. Your business is not special – If you ask 100 leaders why delivering superior Customer service is so difficult, you will hear the same answers over and over again: “Our business is unique.” “In our industry, it is so hard to find employees, let alone ones who care about service.” “We can’t afford to pay enough to get quality people.” “We have a totally different Customer, it is much more difficult.” Every business is dealing with the same dynamics. They are all trying to un-commoditize their service or product from competitors and not get sucked into price wars. 

6. Lack of hospitality training – On average, a company devotes more than 90 percent of its training to hard skills (such as technical and operational skills and product knowledge) and less than 10 percent to soft skills (such as hospitality, relationship building, service recovery, and experiential training). 

7. Low Service Aptitude – The quality of your Customer service comes down to the Service Aptitude of every employee you have. From the CEO to the corporate office support team to every front-line employee — it’s all about Service Aptitude!!! No one is born with it; it is not innate. The vast majority of the workforce has extremely low Service Aptitude. It is not the employees’ responsibility to have high Service Aptitude. It is the company’s job to teach it to them.

8. Lack of purpose motive – Too many companies underestimate the power a purpose provides to front-line employees, which is critical for having high morale in a workplace.

John R. DiJulius III, best-selling author, consultant, and keynote speaker, is the President of The DiJulius Group, the leading Customer experience consulting firm in the nation. He blogs on Customer experience trends and best practices. Learn more about The DiJulius Group or The Secret Service Summit, America’s #1 Customer Service Conference.

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