Excellent customer service is a mindset that always places the needs of the customer above your own. Customer service is a component of the Discipline of Business Development, which leads to predictability.

An attitude of gratitude reminds everyone that the company appreciates the customer’s business. 

A mindset that’s centered on appreciation is positive and proactive. This makes it easy for people to do business with you. You must also establish clear standards that everyone will follow in how they treat their customers so that their customers have predictable and satisfying experiences. 

When people continually think about how to put the needs of others above their own, they become not only better people themselves but better decision-makers who predictably treat their customers with respect. And with a smile. 

It’s important to train your team in this mindset and this attitude. 

Some people say that the only people who must worry about customer service are those who work in the Complaints Department. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Everyone in your company is responsible for customer service. 

Every customer’s experience should be predictable. This means that providing excellent customer service should be automatic for everyone in the company.

To do this you must create clear boundaries of what we will or will not do for the customer. This includes clear guidelines for communicating with our customers.

We accomplish this by establishing clear customer loyalty standards. Customer loyalty standards are a set of words or phrases that define the experience we want people to have with our company. 

Each employee at every level should be clear about and have practice in delivering on the customer loyalty standards. There should be a short list, in clear, concise, and understandable language, of expectations and standards, not rules or policies. It could be as simple as:

• Aiming for consistency.
• Making it easy for customers to buy.
• Introducing the WOW factor by surpassing every expectation.

Here is an example of customer loyalty standards from one of our clients. These clients believe that the lifeblood of their business is the relationships they have forged with their customers. They have defined their customer-loyalty standards with the acronym RELI:

• Relate
• Engage
• Less me/More them 
• Inspire

There are details, explanations, and phrasing that have been defined for each of these words. This has helped train all employees on how this business interacts with every one of their customers.

When a company knows that its customers are loyal, it will generate repeat business. And when loyal customers tell others about you, you’re likely to get new customers in addition to repeat sales.

What gets measured improves. You need a measurement for customer loyalty.

We suggest using a system called the Net Promoter Score, or NPS. NPS is a system that rates loyalty by determining how many customers are Promoters, Detractors, or are Passives.

Promoters are loyal customers who say they’ll recommend the company to their family and friends. Detractors are those who are unlikely to recommend the company. They may even speak against it. Passives are satisfied in general but could just as well do business with someone else.

For a business to determine its NPS, it asks its customers one simple question: On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to your family and friends? 

To repeat, customer service is a component of the Discipline of Business Development (along with marketing and sales). 

We’d love to hear from you. How would you rate your company’s customer service, from zero to 10? Contact us today to learn how to create predictability in customer service.