Added value for the customer

Ron Kaufman, what moves you the most right now?

It concerns me how many companies, industries and organizations are currently concerned with the question of how they can improve their service culture and service quality. The reason for this is that price or product quality has become an interchangeable mass commodity with which you can no longer differentiate yourself. Companies today are asking themselves how they can create more value for their customers. However, this is not just about increasing customer satisfaction and strengthening customer loyalty. A good service culture also has an impact on the employees of my own organization, the internal customers. Professional customer service is always internally motivating, and job satisfaction increases when you work in a customer-centric organization.

What is currently ailing the service culture in the U.S. or around the world?

In times of economic recession, people understandably fear the future: they are afraid of losing their jobs.

Fear prevents interest in the customer

to lose, they fear the competition. The problem is that fear does nothing to create a positive attitude that improves the lives of other people, our customers. It can poison a climate within an organization because employees are more concerned with keeping their jobs than improving the customer experience. The danger is that such organizations fall back into the outdated paradigm of "What do I get out of a good customer relationship?" instead of asking themselves, "What can I do better for my customer today?" When an organization commits to excellent customer service, the happiness and motivation inside that same company can get better without costing them a dime.

Does this generally apply to all companies?

I see good times for classic small and medium-sized businesses. Because the value that such companies can create for their customers can be very intimate, very personalized. Big companies don't have it so easy. Exceptions are organizations like Google: because their whole business model is based on knowing very, very much about their customers. Or let's take the large companies in the pharmaceutical industry: What can they do to create added value for their customers in different markets around the world?

CulturalSensitivity

customers? For example, they can learn that the customer experience is not solely in the product, but in the education about that product. What is needed to be successful globally is cultural sensitivity. It is the ground for a high service culture.

What are the pillars of excellent customer service?

In my book "Uplifting Service. The Proven Path to Delighting your Customers," I list five elements: Why? Lead. Build. Learn. Drive.

"Why" means that everyone in an organization needs to understand why my company places such a high value on service. If we want to improve in customer service, it is necessary that we understand why my organization has made this choice.

"Lead" means that a service culture needs rules and leadership. If a service culture is established, then all members of this company can lead at all levels. Not only the top boss can lead. If you depend on your corporate hero, his mood of the day, to deliver good customer service, your service will not be sustainable.

Customer service therefore needs rules for the entire workforce...

Everyone involved knows what they have to do at all times and in their sleep. Everyone takes responsibility. A culture of "one for all, all for one" is created. This is why a service culture is so important. Other pillars of a service culture, such as those I describe in my book, include recruitment policies, internal communications, service improvement processes, service benchmarking, and others. I list 12 pillars in total.

And the other elements?

"Learning" means learning and applying the principles of a service culture. And by "drive" I finally mean the need to introduce a roadmap of this very service culture. Building a service culture takes time and does not happen overnight.

They say that social dynamics control the quality of organizations....

The fundamental shift that is going on in society and in organizations today is that it is no longer enough to ask how I can be successful today, but what I can do for someone else, in the case of a company, for the customer. Take the example of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet or philanthropists: people have realized that what matters is not how much money we have, but what we can contribute to the community. This is a new mental orientation, a new way of thinking.

And the phrase "the customer is always right"?

The problem with such generalities is that it prevents people from thinking. What would happen, for example, if the customer is wrong for once? In companies that thrive on such clichés, employees then have no suitable answers at hand. But they do exist. For example: A customer complains that our service is slow, although it was carried out at the correct time. In fact, the customer is wrong, but we can satisfy him if we tell him that he is right, that speed is important, indeed an element of service and competition. The attitude that the customer is always right is a false culture, but we can usually agree and prove the customer right about what is important to them and perhaps even to both of us. A stereotyped thinking makes such a common process impossible.

What can industry, banks or governments learn in terms of service culture?

Service culture in industry can mean, for example, that we inform the customer about new applications or uses of which he is not aware. Or how he can better store a product. How to upgrade it. How to achieve an improvement in results. These are all good customer services that create added value for the customer.

Banks can talk to their customers not just about money, but about responsible investing or sound life planning for them and their families. And the raison d'être of governments is fundamentally to improve the lives of their customers, the voters.

Singapore Airlines has a better reputation than its competitors. Why?

Singapore Airlines has worked for the past 39 years to build excellent customer service. This long-term investment is now paying off in terms of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Passengers often pay a higher price than elsewhere to fly with Singapore Airlines because the customer experience is worth it.

Ron Kaufman, what's the next level in customer thinking?

The good news for me is that we live in a very big world. There are many companies and many cultures in it. In terms of knowledge, the world is getting smaller every day. People are interested and continue to learn about what valuable customer experiences are. But the next stage in customer thinking has already begun: It goes by the name of "interaction."

What does that mean?

One of our customers is a telecommunications provider. He had a problem with a shopping center customer where the phone signal was weak. The telecom company decided to use Facebook to communicate when their engineers would solve the problem with pictures of the engineers getting to work and working on a solution. The result was a lot of customer enthusiasm on Facebook. The only thing the vendor and customer didn't do was have dinner at the restaurant with the engineers and shake hands. This type of customer experience is no longer simply about a product or service. The customer experience becomes part of a community, a community. The premise was a compelling vision of customer service: let's create something amazing together.