In a competitive marketplace, the best way to distinguish yourself and keep your customers coming back is to continue to offer quality service. Andremember that quality service is what your customers say it is.
To consistently deliver quality service, listen to what your customers say, identify and meet their needs, exceed their expectations, andstandardize routine procedures. It is important to provide appropriate knowledge. Make sure you deliver what you promise, and don’t promisewhat you can’t deliver. It is also important to include value-added services in what you do for your customers. Remember that customers seekthe benefits that come to them from purchasing your service.
How Quality Gives You the Competitive Edge
Having shifted from the product-oriented marketplace of the Industrial Age to the service-oriented market of the Information Age, the importance ofthe service component attached to products becomes increasingly important. Products are sold on the basis of services promised and delivered. Theduration of the power train warranty on a new automobile is as much a selling point as is the performance of the power train.
In a nutshell, as stated earlier, quality service is what your clients say it is. Many businesses have posted signs with the following rules ofcustomer service:
Rule #1 The customer is always right.
Rule #2 If you think the customer is wrong, read Rule #1.
This reflects the reality of running any kind of business.
Clients’ standards may be unrealistic for different reasons. They may not fully understand what they require from you. They may not fullyunderstand what you can and cannot do for them. It is your responsibility to ensure that the client understands your services and the standards ofquality that may be reasonably expected.
The Four Basic Principles of
Quality Service
Here are the four basic principles of quality service: - Deliver quality service consistently.
- Provide appropriate knowledge.
- Deliver what you promise, and don’t promise what you can’t deliver.
- Add value to standard services.
Deliver Quality Service
Consistently
The following four steps will help you to deliver quality service:
- Listen to your customers.
- Continue to identify and meet your customers’ needs and wants.
- Exceed customers’ expectations.
- Standardize routine procedures.
Hot Tip
If your standards of quality coincide with or exceed your clients’ standards, you will be successful. If your standards fail to meet those ofyour clients, you risk losing their business.
Hot Tip
The surest way to keep customers coming back is to continue to meet their needs and wants better than the competition. In this market-place, you can be certain that your competition will be striving to strengthen their own positions and will be looking at your customers as possible additions to their own cus-tomer bases. Consistently providing quality service to your customers will keep your customers coming back and will also help distinguish you from the competition. You will be able to retain your customers and also use your customer base as a resource for growing your business. Step One: Listen t o Your Customers
Your customers know their businesses better than you do. They also know their problems better than you do. However, they may not know how todescribe their problems or how you can help. By listening carefully to what your customers say, you learn a great deal. Through careful questioning you can help them to describe their problemseffectively so that you can help develop a solution. You can also learn what your customers need to know about you.
The following list contains tips for listening to your customers and learning from them.
Obtain customer feedback. It doesn’t matter how you do this; the important thing is that you find out from customers how you are doing, andthen address any of their concerns. Chapter 16 contains suggestions about how you can do this.
Talk to your employees. Employees who deal directly with your customers probably have some very important information for you. Ask them what yourcustomers are saying, and listen to what they say.
Listen to what customers say, even if they don’t put it into words. If you have shelves of products that never move or an appointment book with a lot of open-ings, your customers may be telling you they are unhappy. Find out why.
Remember that the majority rules. If a vast majority of your customers all seem to say the same thing about your product or service, you must address it—even if it’s a big concern or something that you don’t personally agree with.
Change the little things. If you can make small changes based on customer feed-back, your customers will feel validated.
Think through the big things. Just because customers want a change doesn’t always mean that it is feasible. Don’t discard your good business sense in order to please customers.
Keep up the good stuff. Feedback isn’t always negative. When customers tell you you’re doing things right, be sure you keep doing them.
Let customers be your ears when you aren’t around. Customers can and will tell you how business is being conducted in your absence; take it seriously and act accordingly.
Go the extra mile. Whenever possible, take extra measures to handle customer feed-back and complaints. Your customers will appreciate it, and it will give you an edge over competitors.
Step Two: Continue to Identify and Meet Your Customers’ Needs and Wants
Remember that your customers come to you because they have situations that require your assistance. Do not assume that just because you have identified one need, it is the only one for which the customer needs assistance. The needs that you have identified and perceive as being important may not be the same needs that your customer perceives as being important.
Step Three: Exceed Customers’ Expectations
Your customer will have a set of expectations regarding your service. You should strive to exceed these expectations. This means providing the service better, faster, or less expensively than the customer expected.
Step Four: Standardize Routine Procedures
This step presents a significant challenge. On the one hand, the customer expects and deserves unique nonstandard service. On the other hand, standardizing non–customer service factors improves efficiency and profitability. The factors that can be standardized include formats for reports and correspondence, procedures for gathering and analyzing information, and practices for billing and collecting accounts. With these kinds of procedures, it is not necessary or profitable to continuously reinvent the wheel.
Lawyers and their support staff usually follow standard practices in opening, maintaining, billing, and closing client files. Similarly, individual lawyers have their own established practices in obtaining and recording information from clients. This standardization increases the operating efficiency of both the law office and the lawyer. It also allows lawyers to concentrate more fully on the variable elements in serving individual clients—responding to their unique needs, wants, and expectations.
Building Block
Like law practices, which are essentially businesses that provide legal services, all businesses have routines that are common to all customers. What practices can you standardize to allow you to concentrate more fully on meeting your customers needs? Provide Appropriate Knowledge
The technological revolution and information explosion, which have opened the door to independent businesses in these areas, have also given rise to “instant experts.” With access to an astounding volume of information, these individuals profess expertise in a broad range of areas. They often fail to realize that customers have access to the same information. What the customers need is the knowledge or skills that render specific information applicable to their unique situations.
Chapter 14 dealt with distinguishing yourself and your business from the competition. One of the most effective ways to do this is to understand current information and how it might apply to your customers’ individual circumstances. Providing your knowledge, which is in effect knowing how to apply information, can be a powerful tool in maintaining customer satisfaction.
And if we do have that knowledge that our customers want, we also need to be able to communicate with them at their level.
Communicating with clients involves treading a fine line between using terminology that is too technical on the one hand, and talking down to the client by using language that is too simple on the other.
Make sure that you use terminology that you know your customer understands. If in doubt, assume your client does not understand specialized technology unless and until your customer tells you that he or she is familiar with that terminology.
Deliver What You Promise; Don’t Promise What You Can’t Deliver
Add Value to Standard Services
The best method of distinguishing your regular services from those of your competitors is to add something of value. As a valued-added service, drug stores record the history of their customers’ prescriptions and use this record to provide health advice and safeguards. The nature of the value that you add to your service depends upon your own resources and creativity.
Entrepreneur Beware
As we become more familiar with technical information, we learn to communicate with our colleagues and peers in a form of oral short-hand or jargon. Consultants perform “SWOT analyses,” financial analysts “crunch some numbers,” psycho-logists administer a “WISC-III,” and so on. To those in the know, the meaning of these terms is perfectly clear. To the uninitiated, they are gobbledegook.
For maximum effectiveness, value-added services should meet the following three criteria:
Brevity . The valued-added service should supplement your standard service, not overshadow it.Accuracy . The value-added service must be accurate. Providing wrong or misleading advice or recommendations negates the service and also reduces the credibility of your standard services.
Relevance . Your value-added services must be relevant to your customer and his or her situation.
The Five Basic Truths About Customer Service
1. Clients don’t want the service itself; they want the benefits of the service.
This is particularly true of most professional services. Except for the occasional person who thrives on the attention that comes from medical treatment or court actions, most clients don’t want these services any more than they would voluntarily purchase the services of a dentist or an autobody shop.
What clients really want is the benefits that come from the service. These benefits may include help in resolving a problem, or assistance in acquiring information, or even knowledge or skills that they lack. For example, a benefit that might reasonably be expected as a result of purchasing dental services would be healthier, more attractive teeth. Similarly, the benefits arising from autobody shop services would include the repair and use of a damaged motor vehicle.
2. You are often your customer’s second choice.
Clients will usually consider their internal resources before going outside to purchase services. This means that you are not your customer’s first choice. They need you to perform some task that they are unwilling or unable to perform for themselves.
3. Customers demand quality service.
As noted earlier, the demand for quality service is widespread in our contemporary society. This demand is just as commonplace with business people as it is with non-business consumers.
Business organizations are currently adopting formal quality programs in order to compete effectively internationally. The International Standard Organization’s family of quality standards—the ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 series—has increased the awareness of the importance of quality in business operations. A key ISO principle requires suppliers—that is, you and your competitors—to provide evidence of their ability to deliver quality goods and services. Failure to provide this evidence will put you at a serious disadvantage in competing with those who can provide it.
And after all, businesspeople are also non-business consumers. Recent advertising emphasizes quality as a vital component of consumer purchases. If quality is an important component of people’s personal lives, should it not also be a component of their work lives? If the products they purchase as consumers are “quality checked” should they settle for anything less at work?
4. Standardized technical services will produce comparable results, regardless of the provider of the service.
This is true of every standardized service area. Different insurance brokers will provide policies with analogous features. Although independent, they act as sales agents for the same companies. And assuming they follow the same procedures for the same purposes, independent researchers will also produce similar results. They are, after all, working with the same information.Fortunately, the further one moves away from standardized services, the easier it becomes to distinguish services from those of the competition. The services of individual consultants may offer quite different but equally workable solutions for the same problem. The best solution is clearly the one that works best for the customer.
5. Providing technical information is not quality service.
Generally speaking, most clients are looking for more than technical information. Whenever I consider purchasing new software for my computer, I am not looking for a lecture on the technical specifications of the latest version of the software.
There is no point in telling me about such seemingly exciting features as the improved speed of the latest version of Windows or why one computer with one set of specifications is better than another with another set. I couldn’t care less about these features because I simply don’t need to know that kind of information. What I do care about is whether the software will perform specific functions for me on my particular system.
Quality service in this situation consists of listening to what I am asking, and applying whatever technical information may be relevant to answering my questions in terms that I can understand. Like most consumers, I am usually ready to purchase when I understand what I am buying and what benefits I will receive.
Hot Tip
- Quality service is what your customers say it is.
- Learn and follow through on the basic principles of quality service and customer service.
- Listen to what your customers are telling you they want.
