Implement a customer service process

- One of the ways to show value to your clients or customers is to show a strong level of preparedness. As somebody who's charged with providing customer service in the field, it's important to think about your process for delivering great customer service if your company doesn't already have one. And for organizations as a whole, it's important to think about what is your customer service process? Process is incredibly important, it's what allows you to be consistent, and for customers, consistency is key. People don't go to McDonald's because it's the best food ever, or because it's the cheapest, they go because it's consistent. It's a consistent experience every time. There are no surprises. A cheeseburger in California is almost always identical to the cheeseburger in Canada. It's entirely possible to create uniformly great experiences for your customers, but you have to understand why process is important and how to craft a customer service process. I break this into two distinct stages, proactive and reactive customer service. Proactive customer service is where we reach out daily to our customers in order to strengthen our bonds with them, find new ways to add value and drive referrals. Reactive customer service happens when the customer initiates the contact. How do you react to their contact? I want you to think about the ways that you provide proactive and reactive service. On the proactive side, let me ask you this, what happens when you first see a customer? Do you have a process for how you greet him or her? Does your process outline how you answer the phone and talk to your customers? I'm not saying that you need verbatim scripts for every single thing that might be said, but it's about having a process for the best case scenario, or the way you would like to see certain situations handled. Now think about it from the reactive side, do you have a process for when there's a challenging customer? Or when a customer has a complaint? Or how about when a customer is requesting a refund, or is simply unhappy? If six different associates give a customer six different responses, then we've got a congruence issue, and this creates an even worse experience for our customers. It's not consistent. Spend some time now and write down the different ways that you're servicing customers on a proactive and reactive basis, and then look at your processes, either as a company or as a whole, and ask yourself, where is there more work to be done?