One of the biggest reasons companies do not put nearly as much emphasis into customer service as they should is because there seems to be no immediate impact. We live in an “instant” society that demands immediate results. Marketing, sales promotion and cutting expenses provide immediate results that executives can see. However, many times those things do not have a lasting positive business impact.
If your organization provides World-Class customer service today or it doesn’t really doesn’t matter — today. If you go above and beyond today for a customer, it really has no impact on the bottom line — today. If you resolve a customer challenge or if you don’t really doesn’t matter — today. However, nothing will impact the health of your customer retention, sales, profits, morale, and turnover as much as providing superior service consistently over a period of time. To get managers to be disciplined, patient, not to cut corners or stray away from the plan for a short-term gain is the true underlying obstacle.
You say your customer service isn’t where you would like it to be? You say increasing the training for company-wide commitment isn’t in the budget this year? I am telling you; you can’t afford not to invest in improving your customers’ experience and create a world-class customer service organization!
Let’s look at Starbucks, already the service leader in their industry. Starbucks closed all 11,000 locations in the US one afternoon in February for a 3-hour training session involving 150,000 workers. What most businesses would view as a huge blow to revenue, Starbucks sees as a focus on longer-term sustainable results.
Source: The DiJulius Group