As we celebrate Customer Service Month in October, I want to remind all corporate organisations that their profitability is embedded in their excellent service delivery. As a corporate trainer and business consultant specialised in mindset transformation and attitudinal change at the workplace for personal and corporate success, I have seen companies investing in technology and infrastructure, and aligning business processes to be seamless with less investment in people.
The fact is you can have the best technology, infrastructure and alignment of business processes; but if the people who are to make all this work are not trained well, it’s just a waste of time and resources.
Investment in people, which is your employees, comes first in business before any other kind of investment.
Therefore, in business, two types of people make a business successful or a failure – and those are the employees and customers. The employees must know their jobs, and customers must be served well to leave happy and come back for repeat business. These two people must know each other and understand the role each plays for them to serve each other better. The question is, does your organisation understand the customer, especially the customer’s mindset?
To start with, the customer cares less about the of the employee’s role or the service delivery team not to think of their mindset. The customer’s objective is to enter your organisation or order online and have your service or product delivered within the shortest possible time. They don’t want to know the organisation’s excuses as they only make sense to the organisation and not the customer. This means the onus lies on the organisation to make sure there is customer satisfaction for the customer to be happy and come back for repeat business, leading to customer loyalty over time. This depends 110 percent on the organisation and not the customer.
This shows that for an organisation to understand the customer and provide excellent service delivery, it goes beyond just meeting the customer’s needs to understanding the mindset and behavioural patterns of today’s 21st century customers. Today’s generation is different from the past generation. Customers today are very demanding – and are also very sophisticated. If you understand this as an organisation, then you are halfway to meeting needs of the customer in a special way leading to exceeding expectations.
What is the mindset of today’s customer? I want to start with a disadvantage facing today’s organisations; which is that the customer has options. Monopoly in business is dead or near death in today’s business world. Whatever you are offering, someone is offering the same or a similar service or product next door – giving the customer options if you don’t deliver what you say you will deliver. Today’s customer is more likely to switch allegiance and loyalty at the slightest inconvenience.
Delivering today doesn’t guarantee the customer’s loyalty if you don’t deliver tomorrow.
Customer loyalty is losing its grip because of different and better offerings by competitors in the marketplace. Remember, because of the market’s competitive nature, customers are always looking for the best deal with quality service or product; and because of that, they are always switching allegiance. This means the provision of loyalty cards and building a points system that’s used to make customers loyal to a particular brand is diluted by strong competition in the marketplace.
This goes to show that service delivery has become very critical to the success of any organisation. An organisation can maximise its profitability if it has a strong service delivery team ready to serve the customer.
My first encounter with excellent service delivery was when I visited the United States during my university days. I worked in one of the biggest grocery shops, and one day a lady visited the shop and bought diluted orange juice. She got home and realised the drink had spilled in her car. She called the shop to complain and immediately my manager came and called me to accompany her to the woman’s house. This was so shocking to me, considering the country I come from – which is Ghana – and the poor culture regarding the relevance of customer satisfaction. I told my manager that there would be no replacement for the drink even if it spilled in the store.
At the customer’s house, I cleaned her car and my manager gave her a replacement drink with an apology. On our way back, I asked my manager why the need to waste time and resources to go and replace a bottle of drink that was less than US$1, considering we drove for about 25 minutes in and out.
My manager explained with some mathematical analysis. She used the woman spending US$1 a day as a case study. She said if the woman spends US$1 a day in the shop – which is not real, as you are more likely to spend more – a week is US$7 multiplied by 4 weeks to make it US$28 a month. To cut a long story short, she multiplied the US$28 by 10 years; and that gave a total amount of US$3,360. In her analysis, she transcended this conversation to US$50 a week and projected how much she would spend in 10 years.
Her fascinating conclusion was that if you look at the short-term, you will always lose customers but in the long term have enormous advantages. She said we don’t want to lose any customers, as every customer contributes to their success as an organisation.
In about two weeks, the woman wrote an article about the kind gesture from the company to the local newspaper. The next day, the media was in the shop interviewing my manager. My manager came to me saying: “Oscar, who is winning now? The customer is satisfied and there is free media coverage. Do you think the resources we lost can be compared to what we are gaining?”
There is one thing I will never forget, my manager asked: “Do you think this customer is going to shop with us for the rest of her life, and how many people do you think she will give positive feedback about us that can lead to a potential client acquisition?”
This experience has shaped my life in business when it comes to service delivery. This is the mindset every organisation should have. That is the mindset to treat any client well whether they bring cents to the table or a million dollars. The reason is that the one spending cents today can be spending a million dollars tomorrow, and the one spending a million dollars today can be spending cents tomorrow. That is the irony of life. This life can change anytime, so have the mindset to exceed expectations at all times. My manager exceeded expectations, which led to creating a potential loyal customer for life.
Therefore, making sure you keep a smile on the customer’s face at all times is the secret to profitability and growth. The customer is more likely to come if there is customer satisfaction and customer complaints are dealt with swiftly, with empathy. The customer, they say, is king; and I believe it, because it drives cash flow to the business. Cash flow is the blood of any business; the moment it ceases, the company dies. Therefore, treat the people who bring cashflow to the business well, so that they can keep pumping cash to ensure a continual flow of blood in the form of cash.
>>>the writer is CEO-Train2inspire Consultancy. With Train2inspire Consultancy, our training on Developing an Excellent Service Delivery Mindset is a must for every organisation not forgetting our main training programme dubbed Mindset Transformation for Personal and Corporate Success. Contact us on 0555803924 to book. Let’s drive service delivery to another level. Remember my hashtag, which is – it’s possible if only you believe.
