Resolutions to Serving our Customers Well
Written by Ainsworth Spence, FleetFare
Despite our specialized expertise, we always trusted our instincts to make right decisions based on what we did successfully in the past. For 2017, just trusting our ‘gut’ won’t cut it, but what we hear and what’s in our hearts are very important. Delivery of excellent customer service is simply not just a matter of doing what they ask, but understanding what they need, especially when it’s outside of what you’re normally comfortable with; in other words thinking creatively!
It’s all about situational knowledge versus conditional knowledge, wherein you are talking about delivering certain services at a certain level, based on past experiences. This is synonymous to mimicking machine driven actions as opposed to understanding and responding to current situational behavior.
Generally, no two persons think or act the same, and they have uniquely different requirements, just like no two days are the same as each day have its set of different challenges. So there must be different ways of understanding what is required to improve one’s credibility and make that one of the distinguishing features of doing our job well and serving the customer better.
Taking time to allow the customer to fully vent or express their dissatisfaction is not sufficient, and will probably be too late, whereas, by listening and reading the signs, we can proactively prevent the customer throwing a tantrum or venting their frustrations and disgust with your services. Situational knowledge is the key to be able to find new opportunities to improve our services beyond what we normally are comfortable delivering to our valued customers.
We must understand beyond the business bottom line what the customer truly needs and allow for that service opportunity to connect with the customer’s desired experience while matching that with giving them the ability to truly enjoy your product offerings.
By not creating ‘empowerment bottlenecks’ in the decision making process that prevents your team from clearly thinking of ways to put the customer’s needs first, but empowering them to see and capitalize on all the business opportunities that will make the customer happy and satisfied, should be the resolution for 2017!