What can this brief article possibly offer on customer service that is not already in print, film, or video? How about a brief summary of what all these publications offer. Customer Service 101 describes the basic six steps to building customer satisfaction.

www.amazon.com offers 11 pages of books and workshops on Customer Service. One-hundred-one books, workbooks, and workshops on how to satisfy customers! The first four offer 120 "Commandments," "Ways," "Ideas", and "Steps" for servicing customers.

Wait, you want more? Include 301 Great Customer Service Ideas: From America’s Most Innovative Small Companies. A total of 421 Commandments, Ways, Steps, and Ideas for servicing customers.

Customer Service 101's six steps are so obvious -- they’re just common sense.

1. Developing a customer driven vision to satisfy and exceed customer’s needs and expectations.

2. Identifying most valued customers’ needs and expectations.

3. Developing an operational plan that fulfills your vision.

4. Hiring, developing, empowering, and rewarding the people who carry out the plan.

5. Measuring whether products and services are meeting and exceeding customer’s needs and expectations.

6. Repeating all of the above steps until you retire or expire.

1. Developing and maintaining a living customer driven vision.

Your customer driven vision statement ambitiously defines where you need to be, starting now. Like a lighthouse beacon, it continuously provides reliable guidance throughout your organization. It provides direction, inspires actions throughout the organization, and guides decision making at every level.

It becomes and stays alive when your people know and believe in it. This is best accomplished by having them participate in developing it. [Refer to the VISION section of Common Sense Managing at www.growthassociates.org for more detail]

2. Identifying your most valuable customers and their specific needs and expectations.

Customer driven organizations aim to satisfy all their customers all the time. Reality suggests that this will not always happen. In our world of down sizing, right sizing, reengineering, or whatever the latest ‘ing’ is, clearly we are, and will continue, working with limited resources. It is useful to remember Abe Lincoln’s statement:

Lincoln’s adage pragmatically applied to customer driven businesses would read:

It makes sense to optimize your limited resources to ensure that the "some of the customers" who are satisfied "all the time" are the twenty percent who produce eighty percent of your profits.

Jan Carlzon gained fame by turning money losing Scandinavian Airlines into a winner using management by walking around and managing the "moments of truth." Less well known is his first recognizing that business travelers were the key to profits. He identified the desired customers within Scandinavian Airlines’ goal of being "the best airline in the world for the frequent business traveler." Identifying the most desired customers enabled Carlzon to focus the "walking around" and "moments of truth" on their ‘right’ customers.

Knowing which customers are contributing the most to your financial health is critical in all aspects of planning and execution. This information enables establishing practical priorities for utilizing your resources. Once you know who your most profitable customers are, you are ready to identify their needs and expectations.

Establishing A Customer Knowledge Base

We already suspect that our customers want everything. However, while customers may want everything, they only buy certain things. Identifying what your desired customers need involves building a customer knowledge base that identifies the critical factors your target customers use in their purchase decisions.

A customer knowledge base focuses on what it will take to satisfy customer’s needs and expectations. Establishing a customer knowledge base relies on objectively Asking, Listening, and Responding.

Asking: The questions may be framed in many ways. However, they always cover two central themes:

1. What do you need and expect from us to earn your loyalty?

2. Which of these needs and expectations matter most to you?

Valuable customer information is available through informal focus groups at trade shows and company sponsored meetings. Many companies waste opportunities shmoozing customers at such meetings when they could get far greater returns by setting up Asking and Listening sessions. The best customers want to participate in your company’s direction, not be schmoozed with wine and baubles.

Listening: Effective listening starts with an unbiased listener, representative samples of customers, appropriate questions, and accurate interpreting of the customers’ feedback. Your direct involvement and the use of neutral third party specialists can ensure good data collection design and objective listening.

Responding: Asking the customers what they need immediately raises their expectation that something positive is going to happen. Responding with appropriate timely actions is critical. It is far worse to ask and do nothing with the information, than it is to not ask at all. This is especially so with negative customer feedback.

Finally, customer knowledge must be current to be useful. Customer needs and expectations are fluid and therefore require constant monitoring. A year or two old data may be already too aged to be useful in planning. Week old data may already be obsolete.

3. Developing and implementing operational plans to satisfy these customers.

Planning already began with vision clarification, customer identification, and customer needs identification. Implementation plans contain the goals, measurable objectives, and supporting action items that will:

• Lead the organization backward from the vision.
• Focus the people on doing the right things right.
• Provide the resources to do the right things right.
• Coordinate all resources on meeting the customer’s expectations the first time, every time.
• Create an environment that will motivate and stretch employees to great customer driven performance.
• Measure, recognize, and reward outstanding performance
• Result in delighted customers -- both internal and external customers.

[Refer to PLANNING section of Common Sense Managing at www.growthassociates.org for greater detail.]

Developing the plans is easy once the people know and believe in where they are going. Implementing the plans becomes the challenge. Now is the time to "just do it!" The key to successful implementation is leadership that:

• Uses the vision as the driving force for the entire organization.
• Demonstrates through their daily actions that this is not just another P.O.T.Y. [Program Of The Year]
• Gains credibility by modeling the accountable behaviors -- leading by example
• Executes unbiased and timely measurements of both plans and customer satisfying performance targets.
• Recognizes and rewards appropriate customer satisfying behaviors.
• Implements all the above efficiently enough to make a profit while doing them.

Being driven by the needs of the desired customers enables your company to invest its resources on the critical dimensions that the customers have identified. Consequently you can concentrate your resources on doing the right things right. The result is a win-win situation. Your customers experience increased satisfaction resulting from having their needs met. Your owners experience increased profitability resulting from optimum utilization of resources. Your people gain the pleasure of playing on a winning team.

4. Implement the plan by hiring, developing, empowering, and rewarding the people.

HIRING: Experienced leaders know that how someone’s qualifications look on paper isn’t necessarily how they will perform on the job. Skills can be developed, attitudes are more difficult.

Southwest Airlines’ CEO Herb Kelleher hires for attitudes.

Perhaps he shared a flight with Paul Dickson who suggests:

When hiring, refer to your vision and ask: What kind of people will we need to accomplish our vision?

DEVELOPING: Most service technicians receive weeks of technical training and maybe a half day on handling customers. Small wonder that we find these people focusing on products rather than customers. They are doing what over 95 percent of their training taught them to do -- fixing things rather than customers.

Successful leaders share one-on-one time with all new hires during their first three days on the job. Whether you’re responsible for 25 or 1000 people, imagine the impression it makes on new people when they get to meet you on the first day and learn the customer driven vision directly from the ‘BOSS’.

EMPOWERMENT: This issue is filled with anxiety for many managers. It’s like handing your car keys to your 16 year old for the first time. You had them [hired them]. You raised them [trained them]. But, can you trust them? Successful leaders have learned that they can.

The following mental exercise may ease you through this anxious period. Unless you prefer to be everywhere at once -- on the concourse, in the plant, attending every engineering meeting, maintaining hands-on inventory control, chairing every executive session, reviewing every PR release, editing every statement an employee makes to a customer, policing the parking lot and the mailroom, ... you must let go. So you might as well make the leap of faith by entrusting your people to do their job.

REWARDS: All rewards champion desired performance behaviors. Therefore, insure that salary raises, bonuses, performance reviews, and recognition awards all resonate customer satisfaction results.

Use every opportunity to reward people for their success -- a pat on the back, donuts at the next staff meeting, an e-mail, a share of the savings or profit. The only limit to rewards is not your budget, but your imagination. If people expected to make millions of dollars they probably wouldn’t be working for you. While money is necessary, most people excel with appreciation.

You can not overdo rewards so long as they are sincere. Common sense will guide you to appropriate rewards for your people. If you worry about the quality of your own common sense, ask your people to design the rewards. They have lots of common sense.

Perhaps the biggest reward, and certainly the cheapest, is to listen to your peoples’ ideas and suggestions about work improvements. They deal with the real issues every day. They know which machines need repair or replacement. They know which policies and procedures slow their productivity.

5. Measure and track what your customers think of the products and services they get.

A.T. Kearney, Ltd of Toronto, Canada, found that 8 in 10 customers aren’t getting the service they expect. A Wall Street Journal survey of 2000 American consumers found that only 5 percent thought that suppliers were listening to them and striving to do their best.

DARTS IN THE DARK -- Companies basing their customer satisfaction measurement and tracking on the volume of complaints are truly playing ‘darts in the dark’. They only get feedback from a customer when they "stick" one and that customer yells. At best, this customer feedback allows them to react to individual problems rather than be proactive to customer needs. At worst, customers may simply stop complaining because they gave up and are looking for a new supplier.

DRIVING IN A FOG -- Companies that rely on market share and current volume of orders as indicators of customer satisfaction are ‘driving in a fog’. By the time declines in these lagging indictors are reported it may be too late to respond. In addition, many variables besides satisfaction may effect market share and volume. Consequently, a rise or drop in either indicator does not provide a clear direction for corrective action.

Keep customer satisfaction measurement and tracking very simple. Recognize that customers’ needs and expectations are the only legitimate foundation for any customer satisfaction measurement and tracking system. Factor in the relative importance of these needs and expectations, as the customers have identified them, and work backward to create a measurement system that asks:

?Are we meeting your expectations, especially the most important ones?

There are five basic ways of asking: Mail surveys, personal interviews, focus groups, customer comment cards, and mystery shoppers. The best method, or methods, of measurement will vary with the dynamics of your company and its customers, products, and services.

Selection of the appropriate method will depend on what you specifically intend to measure and how you intend to use the data once you have it. Select the appropriate approach with the same common sense a good carpenter uses in selecting a tool. A hammer is a great tool for driving nails, but lousy for drilling holes. Use your professional network or hire a professional to determine your best measurement process.

Whichever measurement method you use, it will need continuous use over time to render the desired results. Examining customers’ views over time enables you to benchmark and track the feedback so that you can:

• Identify patterns and trends
• Avoid overreacting to individual customer compliments and complaints.
• Gain timely feedback on performance changes -- both planned and unplanned changes
• Proactively identify opportunities for improvement
• Identify and reinforce people and process improvement

6. Continuously work to update and improve each of the above areas.

Common Sense Managers CONSTANTLY:

6.1. Review your vision statements.

Visions are sketched on paper, never on stone. If you etch your vision statement on stone you may be creating an organizational tombstone. Your vision statement needs to be adaptable to accommodate changing customer needs. Always be prepared to refine your vision statement.

6.2. Update your customer evaluations and expectations.

Customers’ buying habits, expectations, and needs CHANGE! Continuously listen to what your customers have to say, not what you want to hear.

6.3. Update your plans.

Whatever you planned three months ago has probably changed. Review your plans against benchmarks and adjust accordingly. The only absolute about a plan is the fact that you need one.

6.4. Reassess your hiring, developing, empowering, and rewarding efforts.

If any one area is not working, fix it. If all the areas are working, improve them. The old adage "If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it." was probably passed on to you by a competitor. Don’t believe it. Winners are always improving.

If we’ve always done it this way,

it’s probably wrong.

6.5. Measure and track what customers think of the products and services they are getting.

Track what your customers are getting, not what they got. Meet and EXCEED customers’ expectations. Then raise the bar. Companies that continuously raise the bar end up competing against themselves.

6.6. Start all over again . . . and again!

Keep improving. Accept continuous customer driven quality improvement as the only path to success. Stay off the POTY [Program Of The Year] and other wasteful organizational fads. It’s easy. It’s fun. It’s common sense.

1. CUSTOMER DRIVEN VISION:

Does your vision clearly focus on customer satisfaction?

Do the people throughout your organization know and own the vision?

2. VALUED CUSTOMERS’ NEEDS & EXPECTATIONS

Do you know who your most valuable customers are?

Do you know what it will take to meet the needs of your best customers?

Is your market research sample reflect your targeted customer base?

Are you ‘listening’ to what the customers are saying or what you ‘want’ to hear?

3. CUSTOMER DRIVEN OPERATIONAL PLAN:

Do your organization's plans focus on doing the right things right?

Will they result in meeting the needs of your best customers?

4. PLAN IMPLEMENTATION

Do your hiring practices complement your vision?

Does your training produce measurable results that further your vision?

Does each person have the authority to fulfill his contribution to your vision?

Are the people given timely feedback and recognition on their job performance?

5. SATISFACTION MEASUREMENT:

Is your customer satisfaction measurement based on customer needs and expectations?

Does it proactively identify opportunities for improvement?

Are your customers satisfied?

6. CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT:

Is your vision still current and appropriate?

Have you reassessed who your most valuable customers in the last 6 - 12 months?

Have you reassessed what your most valuable customers need in the last 6 - 12 months?

How can your current plans be improved to further streamline customer driven actions?

Are you measuring customer satisfaction on an ongoing and timely basis?

What can you do right now that will improve your organization within the next 30 days? 90 days? 180 days?

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