Do It Yourself Customer Service
Do-It-Yourself Strategies to Keep Your Customers Loyal,
Attract New Ones and Increase Your Profits
by Trevina Broussard
What's inside?...
Practical in nature and implementation, this guide will lead you through the process of establishing a successful customer service program for your business and your team. It will be an invaluable aid to help you make sure that you are delivering superior service to every customer, every time. Each chapter ends with a checklist or evaluation, so you can test your company’s mastery of the information in that chapter.
In Chapter One you will learn how other companies are differentiating themselves through exceptional service, why service guarantees can help you stand out from the competition and ways you can add value to the customers experience in order to increase loyalty. It concludes with a checklist to help you determine what elements you may be missing in your quest for achieving superior customer service.
Chapter Two discusses ideas for planting a culture of service—a most important
step in creating competitive-edge service. It will also help you develop a service vision that you can use to focus everyone in your company on the customer, learn the importance of creating a climate of celebration and develop a program customized for your business.
Chapter Three emphasizes the importance of obtaining customer feedback on a
regular basis and gives you ideas on initiatives to gather that feedback. It lists three basic
elements you must learn about your service from your customers and offers sample
questionnaires and a concluding checklist to help you with this most important step in achieving a service edge.
Communicating your expectations through service targets and stressing employee responsibility and accountability is the subject of Chapter Four. It will help you define in specific terms what “excellent service” looks like in your business and work you through the simple steps in the process.
Chapter Five discusses the importance of complaining customers and why and
how complaints give you valuable feedback you can use to increase customer loyalty.
You will learn the primary reasons customers get upset, so you can avoid them in your organization.
How to handle those complaining customers skillfully is the subject of Chapter
Six. Through a step-by-step process, you will learn how to turn that angry customer into a loyal one and receive tips on how to control your own anger when dealing with these difficult customers.
Chapter Seven discusses the importance of the hiring process in selecting
employees who have a natural affinity for good customer service behaviors. It explains why you need to take as much care in hiring customer service employees as you would in selecting a high-level manager. It will help you develop questions and job specifications and guide you through the interview process. A quiz at the end will help you rate yourself on your hiring techniques.
Developing and delivering a powerful orientation program is the subject of
Chapter Eight. It will show you how to develop an effective program that will get your employees pointed in the right direction and comfortable with their new job. You will learn whether or not your program contains all the common elements that make up a successful orientation process.
Chapter Nine shows you how spending the time to thoroughly train your
employees can help you deliver the kind of service that will keep your customers loyal. It discusses the two general areas in which to provide training and how to develop the content for each.
Techniques for motivating your employees to consistently deliver excellent
service and developing the “want to” factor are discussed in Chapter Ten. Ways to create a climate of motivation and examples of both internal and external motivators are discussed. Over fifty different ideas for motivation are provided. Rate yourself with the “How Good Are You at Motivation?” quiz.
Chapter Eleven shares tips on coaching employees to improved performance. It
helps you decide whether it is a knowledge, skill or attitude problem and provides techniques you can use in each circumstance. It also gives you a step-by-step process you can use when employees don’t do what they have been taught to do and the four possibilities for performance improvement.
Retention of your employees is another key to achieving a consistent level of
exceptional service, and Chapter Twelve discusses the Five Rs that will plant a culture of retention in your business to keep your employees working for you longer. It helps you create a “total employment experience” that goes way beyond a paycheck.
Chapter Thirteen helps you see that the process discussed in the book doesn’t
have to take a lot of time. It will make you aware of some of the forces that will affect customer service in the future, so you can plan your next steps in developing a customer service initiative that will help you grow your profits.
The Appendixes give you some specific tools to use while developing your own
approach to doing customer service right!
This book is filled with stories and strategies from the trenches. They are included to show the positive methods that will help the reader discover what can be done, despite obstacles that you think cannot be overcome. The promise of this book is, by following this step by-step approach, your business can use customer service to keep your loyal customers, attract new ones and increase your profits.
Trevina Broussard