Customer care
Technology is fantastic and it also has the potential to depersonalise things. Who hasn’t ranted at the phone as they have navigated their way through an endless series of “If you are calling about your...then please press number 1 on your keypad” messages? Customer care is as important as ever, if not more so, and yet sometimes it feels as we have gone backwards.
Maybe this is just perception and expectations, it doesn’t really matter. What we need to get even better at is making sure that our 50,000 moments of truth, those myriad interactions between our teams and our customers, are as exceptional as possible, and that each one makes a deposit in our corporate emotional bank accounts.
Actually the human side of customer care is really simple. Be polite, courteous and attentive, show that you care about the human being and act with sincerity. You cannot always solve a customer’s problem because of issues outside of your control.
You can however always guarantee that you will do your very best, and you will do it with energy, enthusiasm and discipline. At the very least, the customer will probably appreciate your efforts, and your organisation will once again have meaningfully demonstrated its espoused values in a daily moment of truth.
Despite it being easy to describe, it is still not a given in many organisations. It really needs to be. Genuine and excellent customer care earns loyalty above and beyond the call of duty, it builds trust, it creates promoters of your organisation, and leverages the most powerful persuasion channel of all – what other people say about you.
Consistently effective customer care organisations make it a part of their cultural DNA. It is not a handy add-on for some but not all. It is not the icing on the cake. It is their fundamental differentiator, and one that is hard to copy quickly.
We therefore offer a range of interventions covering the strategic, systemic and cultural issues in becoming a more customer-focused organisation to the operational realities of training your people how to execute even better customer care in each and every interaction.
