Leadership Thought #422 – Are Your Customers Happy?

Leadership Thought #422 – Are Your Customers Happy?

There is no better business strategy than creating delighted customers.

I have just returned from a conference in Mexico, held at the Fiesta Americana in Cabo San Lucas. It was a delightful experience. It has been a while since I felt this valued as a customer. Every resort employee I interacted with genuinely cared about my comfort and happiness. As a result, I felt very relaxed and was fully able to appreciate the beautiful surroundings and my time there. I was astounded by their meticulous attention to detail. This is in direct contrast to another resort in the Caribbean where I stayed last year, which, although unnamed, frequently appears on TV claiming to deliver what it doesn’t while discounting its prices and offering other incentives.

There are countless books out there on customer service and maximizing customer experience, but sadly, few companies heed the advice. Often, it becomes necessary to lower your expectations to reconcile vendor claims with reality. The good news for businesses is that when you consistently get it right, you differentiate yourself from your competition. Here are a few tips to help your company move in this direction that I experienced at Fiesta Americana:

  • Hire people who interact with your customers, who genuinely like people, and who have a passion for delivering quality service. Many tools are available to help you with the screening process.
  • Don’t leave your customer service philosophy/approach open to individual interpretation. Ensure it is clearly articulated, repeated frequently, and omnipresent in your physical surroundings.
  • Offer extensive and regular customer service training, utilizing in-house talent as best practice examples.
  • Customer service should be included as a critical part of the performance evaluation process.
  • Fire people quickly who won’t “drink the Kool-Aid.” You are only as good as your weakest performer.
  • Embrace rather than resist customer feedback. Ask early and often.
  • Reward individual employees and work teams for exceeding standard guidelines to serve your customers.
  • Whenever you receive client testimonials or positive customer reviews of individual employee efforts, make this information visible for all employees to see and absorb.
  • Make customer service a regular item on executive and management meeting agendas. Never “take your eye off the ball” or take past performance for granted.
  • Only promote employees into supervisory positions who genuinely reflect your core customer service values. If you can’t make this connection with an available candidate, continue searching until you find someone who can.
  • Solicit formal recognition from outside organizations, including applying for customer service awards. Opening your business to external scrutiny will shed light on aspects you may be too close to see and will also provide valuable comparative examples.

A company is rarely successful despite its customers. You can cite examples of businesses that had a unique product or were first to market with something, and their initial customers had little choice but to deal with them. However, your long-term inability to properly service your customers only creates an opening for new competitors who will exploit your product or service vulnerabilities. While it may seem cliché, prioritizing the customer in all your actions often leads to positive outcomes.

Someone may even write an unsolicited blog trumpeting your business. 🙂

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