Thursday, May 03, 2007

Customer Service Critical to Success

I received some interesting emails last week when I spoke about the customer service training I was delivering for the State. Those emails led to some interesting conversations about the priority certain organizations place, or don't place, on the importance of serving the customer. To be perfectly honest I was surprised and dismayed to learn what little emphasis some well known companies place in continually training their employees on how to take care of the customer.

I don't want to go out on a rant here (thank you Dennis Miller) but customer service in my opinion is one of the most important functions a company undertakes and it plays a critical role in the success and longevity of the company. Employees at every level serve, regardless of rank and file, serve a customer. Those customers are either internal customers such as staff, co-workers, colleagues, management, vendors or suppliers or external and well, those are the people that vote with their dollars and agree to keep you receiving those nice little things we call paychecks. If you are in a company....simply put you serve a customer.

So why don't organizations place more emphasis on customer service training? Well I believe they have taken their eye off the ball. They focus too much on making this quarter's objectives and long range forecasts but forget that their foundation was and continues to be built by both their people in the trenches and those people/companies that paid for their products and services last week, last month, last year.

Smart organizations know that every single person needs constant and never-ending reinforcement that we as employees are all in the serving the customer game. Smart organizations don't just talk a good game but invest heavily in making sure every single player within an organization appreciates, understands and executes in a manner that delivers outstanding customer service to all internal and external customers period!

Interested in learning how easy (and yes, cost effective) it is to create a more customer focused approach to servicing your customer and ultimately growing your company? Let's chat for a get acquainted session on what my Ripple-Centric approach to delivering my Customer Service Essentials Training can do for you, your team and ultimately your customers.

To schedule some time to chat email me at steve@ripplecentral.com.

Ripple On!!!

Steve Harper

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just had to say, I saw my company as the one you are encouraging others to strive to be. It made me proud. Very cool that you are encouraging others to such high quality service as well.

Anonymous said...

That would be the company that EMPLOYS me. It's not really MY company... hehe

Tisha! said...

Good customer relations is critical to the success of a business and now that I work with governmental agencies I encourage them to see that the same applies in what we call Citizen Relationship Management.

Anonymous said...

This article is tremendously naive!
Customer Service Job Duties