Want to build a customer experience so powerful that it knocks your competition out of the running? To pull this off, you'll need to be able to deliver customer service precisely as you wish it to be delivered--over and over and over. This requires knowing how to design, introduce, and reinforce customer service standards.
Sounds good, right? However, you may ask yourself: "Well, how do I get there? How do I convey standards to my employees and successfully diffuse them throughout my organization in a way that sticks?"
Here’s how.
First, you need to be clear about the what, and the why, of your customer service standards: what they are and why you've created them.
There is, in fact, a specific way that every standard in your organization needs to be designed and explained, a three-part method for communicating a standard in a way that guides but allows your employees the autonomy to adapt the execution of the standards to suit the needs of the customers they’re actually facing at the moment.
As follows:
The summary statement for a standard should include the following:
1. Why the service is of value (why we’re doing this in the first place)
2. The emotional response we’re aiming to have the customer feel
3. The expected way to accomplish the service. (Point three should be formulated in a manner that allows judgment and discretion to be used in all but mission-critical situations.)
Now, correctly articulating your customer service standards is one thing.
Then, you need to set your people up to succeed, with the patience and good steering that keeps everyone working toward the same goal.
Here's a story from Isadore Sharp, founder and chairman of Four Seasons Hotels And Resorts, that illustrates the adaptability and steady hand that can be required to convey standards successfully.
This takes place on an under-resourced island where Four Seasons had recently opened a resort after a series of weather catastrophes and training challenges. It shows how the training of employees in service standards can be accomplished even when the staff themselves, drawn from the local population and chosen for traits rather than for prior experience, have never experienced such service. Sharp himself only realized how much patience and understanding this can require after he visited for the opening.
I ordered room service. A young lady came in with my order and set it up on the terrace. ‘‘Where did you learn to do this?’’ I asked her.
‘‘What job did you have before?’’
‘‘Oh, I never worked before,’’ she told me. ‘‘This was my first job, sir.’’
‘‘Then how did you learn to do this? There are a lot of items, and everything’s here, placed exactly as it should be.’’
‘‘Well, sir, they taught me everything.’’
‘‘That’s interesting,’’ I said. ‘‘How did they do that?’’
‘‘They let me take everything home for me to practice with my family,’’ she explained.I began to realize what [the manager in charge of training at this resort] had meant by patience and understanding. He had put in place a training program for people with absolutely no conception of international hotel service; let alone how to achieve it. He had done this through judging, by attitude, whom we should or shouldn’t hire, then patiently helping them understand how and why we did things, and doing this in a way that wouldn’t make them reluctant to go on asking questions until they got it right.
While allowing employees to take work home with them may not be what’s called for in your situation, creating an environment where asking questions and making mistakes is absolutely encouraged and support is provided by peers, may be exactly what you are looking for.
But if this example doesn't resonate for you--and certainly this is a situation-specific approach (which is, in many ways the point--your adaptability in getting to where you know you want to go), here's a formula I offer that works well for my clients as a customer experience consultant.
The PEPI method: Upholding and energizing customer service standards
If you want to keep your service standards alive--energized--you need to do a bit more than communicating them initially and training on them. Consider using my acronym PEPI as your framework. (I pronounce it "peppy," but you're on the honor system here.)
Purpose: Inspire employees with a clear sense of the purpose of their organization, and their purpose in the organization—and help them grow their understanding of how your service standards support these.
Enforce intelligently: Keep things simple, keep them visual, and reinforce, reinforce, reinforce.
Peer pressure: Positive peer pressure is a must.
Input: Employees are able to have a say in the refinements,
changes, and even possible future abolition of the standard.
These four fundamentals can do a lot to help you find companywide support for new standards you introduce. And to keep those standards alive after the introduction.
Micah Solomon is a customer experience consultant, keynote speaker and author.
