One of the biggest challenges facing businesses is figuring out how to “achieve and sustain” service excellence. Numerous research studies have indicated that many businesses have no strategy or sustainable processes for building out a service excellence brand that boasts a consistently positive customer experience and sustained customer success.
When I ask random businesses to share their formulas for keeping customers happy, I receive answers that are as variable as the number of businesses being polled. Moreover, I receive many deflective responses, designed to make a case for why some of the businesses are failing to achieve and sustain service excellence.
Some businesses surrender to the temptation to settle for the lazy, hit and miss approach. This approach delivers a false sense of adequacy, where a business believes that the random customer smiles, periodic compliments and daily traffic, mean that its current level of customer experience, equates to customer happiness. This is often a false positive corollary.
Numerous research studies have indicated that many businesses have no strategy or sustainable processes for building out a service excellence brand that boasts a consistently positive customer experience and sustained customer success.
As a side note, it’s easy to achieve random customer smiles throughout the day, depending on which employee the customer encounters. These smiles are linked to those employees who possess the attitude, skills and behaviours that earn them the “customer-centered employee” designation. If a customer interacts with these employees, the outcomes, invariably, will be positive. Just depends on who the customer meets.
I feel elated when I receive, from time to time, cogent blueprints that are congruent, systematic and propitious. Invariably, these blueprints come from businesses that have approached the business of customer experience and customer success from a standpoint of long-term sustainability. They eschew the spotty, hit and miss approach.
A missing link in the business of achieving service excellence, is the absence of literacy at the leadership level regarding what service excellence means, the basics of customer experience design and how to apply the mechanisms for measuring customer success.
A missing link in the business of achieving service excellence, is the absence of literacy at the leadership level regarding what service excellence means.
Basically, the challenge boils down to ignorance. Businesses just do not possess the intelligence or the scientific “know-how” to create the intricate infrastructure that comprises the framework for long term sustainability of service excellence. So, they normalize around meagre, minimum effort that will not lead the business to ruin.
Whenever I encounter a business that does not blink when I outline the sheer magnitude of the journey to service excellence, I know that I have conjoined with a winner.
The journey to overcoming the age-old challenge of achieving long-tern service excellence, has to begin with discarding the affinity for short-term, spotty customer happiness. This unbundling will help reset the business modus operandi from comfort with paying lip service to service excellence as a default state, to repealing a frivolous approach to keeping customers happy.
Next up would be launching a service excellence literacy program, designed to infuse a new level of intelligence across the business, regarding some of the key domains associated with achieving customer happiness. The intention here, is to use subject matter expertise as the elemental lever for elevating the customer experience to a new level of magic.
Businesses just do not possess the intelligence or the scientific “know-how” to create the intricate infrastructure that comprises the framework for long term sustainability of service excellence.
I’ve worked with leaders who experience a powerful epiphany the moment when they discover that the only way that customer magic can be achieved, is when the entire business ecosystem is unified around knowledge, expertise, science and a passion for customer happiness.
A corollary to this process of literacy and expertise-driven movement to service excellence, is the acceptance that deep, transformational effort is required to deliver customer experience magic. The infrastructure on the inside of the business has to be properly wired for customer success, on the outside. There are no shortcuts to success.
There is a strong tendency in some businesses to dissociate “warm and friendly” from “world class.”
The modern-day customer expects both of these superlatives to be present in his or her experience. Achieving this sweet spot will require a multi-layered, multi-pronged and multi-faceted approach to the business of service excellence.
The infrastructure on the inside of the business has to be properly wired for customer success, on the outside. There are no shortcuts to success.
So, let’s say that a business decides to take the plunge and supplant its sluggish approach to delivering a memorable customer experience, with a knowledge, expertise and science-driven approach, protecting this transformational effort from slippage, should be a primary goal.
One of the most effective guard rails, is a system of customer experience oversight for policing and enforcing compliance with the new “customer first” way of life.
This protective measure should not be overlooked, since doing so would be an act of recklessness.