Evaluation or corrective information given by the customer to the salesperson

“If you’re looking to improve your customer experience, start by creating a customer service philosophy for your support team. Having a shared philosophy keeps everyone focused on the same goal and helps them understand the holistic approach to achieving that goal.”

In an environment in which front-line staff deal with an endless stream of unpredictable scenarios, having a strong philosophy helps empower team members, provides a coherent story to help employees understand company values, and sets the foundation for a customer-first strategy that’s proactive rather than reactive. No matter which employee a customer interacts with, they will experience the same delightful service that epitomizes the company’s values.

Photo by Blake Wisz on Unsplash

“A customer service philosophyis a shared mission for your support team, a set of guiding principles that ensure you’re upholding your core values with every customer interaction.”

Generally, a customer service philosophy is composed of two parts: vision and values.

Customer Service Vision

The first section of a customer service philosophy is a customer service vision statement, which Jeff Toister defines as “a statement that clearly defines the type of customer service employees are expected to provide.”

Customer Service Values

Your vision statement is followed by your team values. Customer service values impact the experience the customer receives and they help to define the personality and attitude the business is trying to put forth. Often companies offer training to employees on how to uphold these values.  For example, “The staff at Apple retail stores are all screened and trained with a great deal of scrutiny before they make it out onto the sales floor to interact with customers. Apple’s Genius Training Student Workbook reveals a great deal about the extent to which the company goes to sufficiently train and produce the level of quality service anyone who’s visited an Apple store comes to expect.  In fact, everything you’ve expected from the moment you arrive until the time you leave has been tediously thought out and most of it scripted. So what does A.P.P.L.E. really stand for when it comes to training staff on how to sell? It actually means:

Approach customers with a personalized, warm welcome.
Politely try to understand all the customer’s needs.
Present a solution for the customer to take home today.
Listen for and resolve any issues or concerns.
End with a fond farewell and an invitation to return.

Creating a Customer Service Philosophy for Your Team

Careful contemplation is the first step. Ask yourself some key questions. What is the purpose of your company? What is the role of customer service within your company?  What experience should the customer have for your company to fulfill this role? What does this look like for your customer service representatives?  What are your company’s core values and how are they prioritized?  What are the principles that should guide your employees who interact with customers daily?  How will employees easily remember these principles?

There’s no fixed format to a customer service philosophy. But having it down on paper — preferably a digestible one-pager — will allow your service reps to reread and internalize it. Take your answers from above and integrate them into a coherent piece.

Although good customer service philosophies have a few things in common, no two should be the same. For a philosophy to succeed, it needs to align with your team’s specific values, goals, and long-term vision for your relationship with customers.

Develop Service Standards

Service standards are guidelines for employees to follow when interacting with customers.  Do not make them too rigid or strict as not all standards will apply to every customer situation.  This gives employees the flexibility to adapt to each customer’s unique needs within a standard framework.  Customer service guidelines should align with the company’s brand.

Standards may be as simple as:

1. Make the customer feel welcome (e.g., greetings, body language)
2. Efficiently serve customer’s needs (e.g., listen actively, ask probing questions, offer suggestions, take action)
3. Look for additional ways to serve the customer (e.g., ask if there is anything else you can do, share promotions or new opportunities)
4. End the customer interaction (e.g., thank the customer, follow up if needed, summarize what you have done if necessary)

As the Canada Revenue Agency puts it, “Service standards publicly state the level of performance that citizens can reasonably expect to encounter from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) under normal circumstances. The CRA is committed to developing, monitoring, and reporting on a full suite of service standards in areas of importance to taxpayers and benefit recipients. Service standards support the CRA‘s commitment to Canadians for transparency, management accountability, and citizen-focused service.”

“Starbucks strongly believes in meeting customer service standards. For example, employees are taught to put effort into the visual look of each drink. When you order a caramel macchiato at Starbucks, it has a precise pattern of caramel sauce. It has a lattice of seven vertical and horizontal lines with two full circles around it. They also pay attention to every detail in the store — from the lighting to the furniture, they’re on point!”

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

The customer service team should be provided with clear documentation regarding how to handle common customer service complaints, what language to use and to avoid, how to document service issues, guidelines for escalation, the lengths employees can go for customers, and where to go with any questions or problems. Using documented processes and procedures the easier it will be for the team to understand how to act in a given situation. With that said, you do not want the company processes and procedures to be overly cumbersome or complicated, otherwise, employees may have difficulty following them.

Develop Customer Service Goals

Setting customer service goals can serve an important role in managing service teams.  Set SMART goals. Good goals focus attention on the right things, while poorly shaped goals focus attention on other things.

The service provided to customers, at every touchpoint, must be excellent and demand little effort from the customer in order to foster their loyalty. Customer service should make an extra effort to ensure customer happiness and satisfaction. Customer interactions need to be pleasant experiences, customer problems must be resolved quickly and customers need to be totally confident in the services provided.  Having a broad understanding of what excellent customer service looks like is a good step toward defining specific goals along with a plan that will lead to their attainment.

SMART GoalsS = SpecificMake your goals specific and narrow for more effective planningM = MeasurableDetermine what evidence will prove you are making progress. Re-evaluate when necessary.A = AttainableEnsure you can reasonably accomplish your goal within a certain time frame given available resources. Stakeholders agree it is achievable.R = RelevantGoals should align with your values and long-term objectives.T = TimeboundSet a realistic end date.  This will help with task prioritization and motivation.

For example, a manager may set a goal for the service team to “increase customer satisfaction”, but this goal does not inform the team of how to obtain this goal or the specific amount of increase the manager is expecting.  We might do better by saying, “increase customer satisfaction by 10% over the next month”.  The manager and staff should know how customer satisfaction is measured and that a 10% increase is a realistic expectation.  The manager would then provide strategies on how this might be done.  As well, incentives might be set for the service team to encourage their best performance.

There are many goals for achieving excellent customer service. The image below shows a list of 25 company goals for customer service.

25 company goals for customer service

Watch the “What are SMART Goals? Quick Overview with 21 SMART Goals Examples” YouTube video below to learn about SMART goals. Transcript for “What are SMART Goals? Quick Overview with 21 SMART Goals Examples” Video [PDF–New Tab]. Closed captioning is available on YouTube.

We cannot blame a wait staff who fails to increase the number of customers served in a given week if we later discover that due to having live entertainment all week, customers were sitting longer at their tables which resulted in fewer table changeovers, meaning staff were serving the existing customers longer rather than serving new ones.  The goals managers set for staff will impact how the staff perform and what they choose to focus on.  So if speed is the objective then customer care may suffer as staff become obsessed with serving each customer quickly rather than serving each customer exceptionally.   There must be a balance between efficient service and quality, effective service, and set goals must drive employees in that performance direction.

“Profit-focused goals can hurt the customer relationship and unrealistic goals demotivate and burn out employees.  The goal structure should be set in a way that if your customer support representatives achieve their goals it will propel the support manager closer to meeting his or her goals. Which in turn moves the director of support closer to meeting their goals.  Typically, the goals of the director will be broad and align with specific company objectives.  The customer support manager’s goals will be positioned more towards operational objectives – make sure everything is running smoothly and efficiently. Customer support representatives will have more direct customer-centric goals like reducing response times, and improving resolution rates.”

Train Your Team

Investing time and money in customer service training can prove to be an invaluable investment for businesses of diverse sectors and sizes. Teaching members of staff the competencies, knowledge, and skills required to increase customer satisfaction and therefore customer retention is a shrewd way for businesses to ultimately increase their sales performance.  Offering workplace training can provide staff with the necessary skills to strengthen their customer service skills, including communication, empathy, patience, and consistency, as well as adaptability. No matter the industry a business operates within, if it deals with customers, strong customer service skills are essential in ensuring customers remain loyal and a high level of customer retention is achieved.  Workplace training that is focused on customer care will give employees valuable insight into how to develop and fine-tune customer service abilities. Such training will empower course participants to have to knowledge and confidence to provide effective solutions when they are faced with problems or difficult customers.

Photo by Tbel Abuseridze on Unsplash

First off, hire the right people.  During an interview tell potential employees what your customer service philosophy is and share your company’s missions, values, and goals.  Then test applicants to see if they are a good fit.

Once hired, orient your new hire to the company and to the team of employees they will work with.  Let them observe how things are done and how customer issues are resolved.  Provide information on the company’s mission, vision, values, and goals, and explain how your department/area fits into the overall company goals.

Provide specific training on how to serve customers, even the difficult ones.  Many service representatives do not know how to recover from a bad service situation with an upset or angry customer. A new employee can work alongside an experienced employee for a while and learn how to do things that will delight customers as well as support company goals.  Such programs are often termed, coaching, mentoring, on-the-job training, or job shadowing. Training may entail a more structured form such as classes teaching new employees how to use customer relationship management software, use phone systems; deal with service breakdown and service recovery; learn how to provide value to customers to encourage long-term loyalty, learn how to upsell or cross-sell in a way that customers will value; learn about the company vision, mission and goals; or manage social media platforms to serve and interact with customers.

Watch the “Service Recovery – Look, Sound, Feel” YouTube video below to learn about effective service recovery. Transcript for “Service Recovery – Look, Sound, Feel” Video [PDF–New Tab]. Closed captioning is available on YouTube.

The Disney Institute does a great job at training Disney employees, so much so, that they offer on-demand online training to other companies who may wish to provide customer service training to their own employees. Disney’s website states, “In this on-demand course, our team will highlight how excellent service is the result of truly understanding your customer expectations and how to put the right service standards in place to exceed them. Begin to learn not only how to start to differentiate your organization from competitors, but how to build customer loyalty through quality service.  In this on-demand course, you will learn to:

• Assess and improve your organization’s commitment to quality service
• Differentiate and elevate your service to become a provider of choice
• Design standards for quality service and create a consistent service experience
• Gauge the needs, wants, stereotypes, and emotions of your customers at an individual level
• Understand the processes necessary to develop a workplace culture that consistently delivers exceptional service
• Recover effectively from a service failure and turn it into an opportunity to strengthen customer relations”

Of course, there are many other training programs a company may utilize, such as those offered in LinkedIn Learning or those created in-house that are customized to the way your particular company goes about performing operations and serving customers.

Evaluate Service Quality

As a service manager, you continually need to be evaluating the quality of customer care your team provides. Key performance indicators (KPIs) measure how effectively a company is achieving its goals against a set of targets, objectives, or industry peers.  Organizations use KPIs at multiple levels to evaluate their success in reaching targets.

Listed below are some of the ways in which you might measure service quality.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric that businesses use to gauge how their customers feel about them. It measures your customers’ willingness to recommend your company, product, or service to others. Companies with a high NPS are more likely to achieve long-term profitable growth.

Customer retention rate is another way to evaluate service quality. “Even a 1% improvement in retention means a 5% profit increase per customer. Think about that. It’s easy to see why every organization must do what they can to maximize customer retention.”

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) Surveys. Obtaining customer feedback through customer satisfaction surveys is one way to gain customer insights.  Surveying employees and asking for suggestions on customer service processes and procedures may lead to customer service improvements. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a customer loyalty metric used by companies to gauge how satisfied a customer is with a particular interaction or overall experience.

Watch the “How to Use the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) Metric” YouTube video below to learn how to use customer satisfaction scores. Transcript for “How to Use the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) Metric” Video [PDF–New Tab]. Closed captioning is available on YouTube.

Mystery shoppers and observation.  Simply observing your team in action can help you identify common issues.  Having a mystery shopper experience the service and processes your company provides and then reporting this experience back to you can help you understand where service breakdowns may occur.

Customer engagement metrics. Customer engagement starts from the first touch point and incorporates subsequent interactions, including the time customers spend with your brand and the actions they take throughout their journey. Customer engagement metrics are effective in measuring service accessibility and the quality of customer experience.

Social media monitoring. Monitoring tools help understand what people are saying about you on social media. Insights like this paint a richer picture than simply relying on traditional media.