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Surpass Customer Expectations

What are you doing to raise the bar and exceed your customers’ expectations? If you are not continually improving how you produce your products and deliver your service, you cannot exceed your customers’ expectations. Customers are pickier, now more than ever, about where they spend their money. Look at it from your customers’ perspective: what makes your company so special to them that they are willing to spend hours/days/weeks of their pay on your products or services? And how can you make what you have to offer important enough for them to want to suggest your organization to their friends and families?

While it may be your employees who are delivering the service, it is you, the leader who sets the bar for the standard of service. It is important that you have a clearly defined service standard, and that you walk the talk at all times. Remember, you are the role model. Each day, make sure your actions are what you want your employees to emulate.

The following six recommendations will help your organization take customer satisfaction to an even higher level.

1. Have a clearly articulated customer service vision and set of values that describe in detail what customers will experience when they do business with your company. The vision should be a clear mental picture of what the end result looks like. The organizational values are then the guidelines that help us to make the right decisions that will turn the vision into a reality.

2. Hire for attitude and train for skill. You can tell which people enjoy serving others and making customers happy. You can also tell those who consider customers and their needs to be, “just a job.” People with great attitudes enjoy serving others, are easier to train, and are better at developing multiple options if the company’s standard way of serving and satisfying customers is not successful.

3. Tear down the walls that insulate employees from customers. There are some employees who never have customer contact. We highly recommend introducing customers and sales representatives to employees. When employees know the customers are real people, not just a name or an order number, there is a stronger commitment to satisfy the customer. Two ideas that have proven successful are to 1) videotape a customer being interviewed by a company representative and 2) bring customers on-site for a customer appreciation day and have the employees provide tours.

4. Train every employee. Companies who successfully train every employee to focus on the customer and their total satisfaction, have more loyal customers and are a more profitable business. Does every employee in your company know the average dollar value of one job or the annual dollar value of an average customer? Training helps in the areas of customer knowledge, teamwork and job satisfaction.

5. Measure customer satisfaction. Companies should be measuring whether or not they are exceeding customer expectations on an on-going basis. Measuring your customers’ satisfaction with quality, service, and timeliness are critical indicators of an organization’s long-term success.

6. Reward results and celebrate successes. It will be important to align your performance review process and reward system with an organization that focuses on customer satisfaction. And last, when your customers’ expectations have been exceeded, celebrate the success.

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