Great sporting legends such as Jesse Owens, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Maurice Greene, Donovan Bailey, Tim Montgomery, The Bahamas Golden Girls, Marion Jones, Thomas A. Robinson, and Carl Lewis, have inspired the world in the ethnos of track and field.
Many world records were set and nations paid homage to their outstanding performances in both amateur and professional athletics. Even though they were celebrated heroes during different legacies, they have one thing in common. They understood the power of follow-through. Their potential, purpose and their elevation to the global ethnos of track and field would never be recorded until they competed and crossed the finished line victorious. This is also true regarding customer service organizations. The total number of customers they service every day does not measure their success; it is measured by their aptness to service the customer at a plateau of total customer satisfaction.
One of the major problems service organizations face is one of follow-through. It is easy to convince a customer to acquire life, health, medical and other types of assurance plans. However, it becomes a challenge for sales agents and customer service managers to develop a competitive and viable strategy to maintain the status quo and follow-through with customers before, during, and after problems arise. Service organizations often find themselves being indicted by customers for “dropping the ball”.
One negative exposure that drives a customer insane is when an organization is being paid to service a customer and the organization drops the ball. To a service organization, it may not be a big deal, after all, the service organization has the money in the bank and it is not a priority to maintain customer satisfaction until the organization’s financial stability or market share is being threatened.
Customer service organizations need to develop a systematic approach to customer service that integrates the management of customer service follow-through. Managing customer service follow-through becomes a major challenge when managers fail to monitor the inflow and outflow of customer requests. When there is no methodology to the “madness” the end result is a fabrication of customer service chaos and confusion.
The lack of a systematic approach to managing follow-through also ignites key areas in the customer service model setting off active volcanoes. These active volcanoes are triggered by the organization’s inability to deliver on-time customer service. Service organizations set standards to deliver effective customer service. However, they grossly fail to follow-through, to determine if the standards are working, viable, timely and effective.
Service organizations spend thousands of dollars on advertising in an effort to create awareness for products and services. Nevertheless, they “chinch” when it comes to developing effective customer retention programs such as following-up with customers to ensure total customer service satisfaction. Why is follow-through necessary? It is necessary because:
* External customers are anticipating on-time customer service delivery
* Customer service centers should be audited
* Processing centers requires constant auditing
* Customer service is not complete until service professionals follow-through
* Follow-through brings chaos under subjection
* It promotes efficiency within the organization
* It brings clarity of vision to external customers
* It minimizes the impact of active volcanoes
* It manages pressure centers
* It manages customer service centers
* It is a key formulation to customer service delivery
When organizations do not develop a model that tracks the inflow and outflow of products and services in customer service centers and processing centers, the end result is major time delays. Time delays are a result of poor communication between the internal customer and the external customer. It is also a result of poor communication between the customer service center and the processing center. When the two aforementioned variables take place either one of them significantly contributes to a system failure. What strategies can service organizations execute in an effort to improve the level of customer service based on follow-through?
DESIGNATE PERSONNEL WITH FOLLOW-UP FUNCTION
Every service organization should have in its mandate the need to develop and redefine customer service in an effort to provide exceptional customer service. Even though this sounds like a fancy customer service corporate strategy, the bottom-line here is, organizations need to monitor the level of customer service being offered and its impact to the external customer. One key strategy is the implementation and designation of a systems flow person. The role of this person is to manage and monitor customer service thus ensuring that timelines are adhered to as well as minimizing time delays and improving communication between internal customers.
CONSISTENLY ANALYZE CUSTOMER SERVICE CYCLE
Organizations must develop creative strategies to deliver effective customer service. To achieve this, customer service cycles must be monitored in an effort to minimize volcanic eruption centers and ignite pressure centers to unacceptable levels. When customer service cycles are consistently checked to maintain stabilization levels, external customers are likely to complain or press the “Red Alert” button less frequently.
CREATE INTERNAL CUSTOMER SERVICE AWARENESS
Service organizations also fail to deliver effective customer service because they fail to create internal customer service awareness. Customer service awareness is vital because when policies change at the executive level, very seldom the message has clarity of vision. In addition, very seldom the message is translated and disseminated to the persons that have to execute these functions. Therefore, management should develop an awareness programme to ensure that the right message is delivered to external customers.
Even though there are many ways to effectively deliver customer service to the external customer, it is imperative that service organizations fully utilize the power of follow-through. It is through this process that organizations can achieve customer service loyalty, retention and total customer satisfaction. Without customer service follow-through, it becomes difficult for an organization to remain on the cutting edge and be effective.
The following articles are partial excerpts from the following training programmes:
* Reengineering Employee Performance
* Reengineering Employee Performance Management
* The Power of Teamwork
* Principles of Customer Service
* Customer Service Management
* Sales & Marketing
* Introduction to Computers
* Introduction to Excel
* Introduction to Microsoft Word
* Introduction to Powerpoint
* Customer Relations
* Customer Relations Management
* Power Stones To Team Performance
By Bert Mullings,
A corporate trainer and business consultant
