I have recently been reading a book by Julie Kampf called From My Bad to My Best: How Individuals and Companies Can Differentiate Themselves in the Age of Mediocrity. The book provides some great insights and ideas on how to maintain and build a great culture within your company rather than allow today’s “age of mediocrity” take root and negatively affect your business. It goes on to demonstrate how this mediocrity, of it does take hold, finds its way into poor customer service. However, Kampf also highlights several examples of companies that are getting it right and have turned around their bad experiences into, as Steve Jobs puts it, “an environment where excellence is expected.” Kampf then provides immediate action plans to help companies ensure they are on the right path to stamp out mediocrity and provide a superior customer experience. Here are some ideas from the book:
- Focus on Consistency: Providing a top quality product or service once is much easier than providing your customers with a quality experience every single time.
- Be Transparent: Customers value honesty and integrity and being transparent increases customer trust, which enhances the customer experience.
- Invest in Training: How your employees are trained directly impacts the quality of your customer’s experience. The more training they receive, the more consistently your team can deliver excellence.
- Build in Follow up: Communication can solve so many customer complaints! Lack of information only generates more questions, more phone calls, more emails, and more complaints.
- Make Customer Satisfaction the Hallmark of our Company’s Culture: Aim to be known for delighted customers more than anything else.
- Take Pride in Your Workmanship: Don’t take shortcuts. Give your clients your best work.
- Make Reparations: When you mess up, apologise and make things right. That means reimbursing your customers in some way for their inconvenience or poor service provided.
- Listen, Listen, Listen: How can you satisfy your customer’s needs if you don’t know what they need to begin with?
- Create the Opportunity to Provide More: There are nothing more pleasing to your ears as an MD than hearing someone ask, “What do you think I should do?” That shows trust and that leads to greater and more expanded opportunities to grow your relationship.
- Exceed Expectations: Find ways to make people do a double take and think, “Wow, I didn’t expect that.” This is the most important tip for gaining new customers and clients and making people take notice.
