1.  Share stories of great service within your company, agency or location. Use bulletin boards, email or meetings—whatever you’ve got at your disposal.

2. Ask customers what they want! You can use surveys or focus groups to get feedback from customers directly OR ask employees what they’ve been hearing from customers in the way of wants, needs and desires.

3.  Look! Listen! Learn! Have employees actively check out what other organizations are doing –both good and  bad. (It’s especially great when you can have them observe what the competition is doing.)  Recognize or reward them when they bring forth observations your team can use to improve its service level.

4.  Regularly reward employees for giving great service. Small and inexpensive rewards can work well.  For example: movie tickets, coupons to leave work a half-hour early, a pass to park in the boss’s space for a week, etc.

5.  Post key customer service concepts in prominent places.  Add visuals and snappy phrases.  Post in the break room, cafeteria or on entry/exit doors.

6.  Ask employees to keep a lightbulb list nearby so they can jot down new ideas to improve customer service as they occur.  Reward and recognize employees whose ideas are implemented.

7.  Train employees by: providing brown bag lunch learning sessions where you bring in a guest speaker or motivational video; sending them offsite for a community college training course  or paying for them to take a course online; maintaining a lending library of self-study audio CDs, DVDs, books and periodicals.

8.  Job Rotation Day.  Designate one day a month when a number of employees cross-train and learn a little bit about somebody else’s job.  Draw names randomly so everyone gets a chance to do this over time.  This gives employees a chance to see the big picture of the workplace and gives employees who don’t typically interact with customers an opportunity to do so.

9.  Revolving Brainstorm Bulletin Board.  Set up a webpage or suggestion box for employees to bring forth customer service problems (anonymous is usually best). Post the problems and provide methods for other employees to propose possible solutions.

10.  Have fun at work!  Studies show happy employees are healthier and they give better service. Here are just a few ideas:

·         Awards – Create a rotating award relevant to your organization.  The awards can be funny or serious.  Once a month, give the award to a team member.

·         Decorate – Decorate the workplace for holidays or seasons.

·         No Reason Parties – Throw a little party for no reason at all.

·         Ice Cream Social – Walk around and hand out a selection of ice cream treats.  If your employees work on a retail floor, put them in the freezer for everyone to have on their break.

This material excerpted from the Leader’s Guides to the video programs Remember Me and Fun is Good.

Need more help in this area? CRM’s new video program, WAYMISH (Why Are You Making It So Hard…for me to give you my money), comes with a special video just for supervisors.  Find out why WAYMISH was voted a “Best Product 2009” by Training Media Review.

Here’s an activity to help you identify the “lifetime value” of a customer. Below are some figures that give customer lifetime values in different types of businesses.

Expenditures per visit for various industries & estimates of the 1- and 10-year values of one customer:

Now let’s do the same for you. What’s your favorite store? Think about all the places you shop – clothing stores, grocery, electronics, home improvement stores, coffee shops, bookstores, pet stores, warehouse stores, online stores…How much do you spend each time you go in your favorite store? What’s your business worth to them over a year? 

Now, think about one of your regular customers. Each one of them has a “lifetime value” to your company. Do some more math, and you’ll see how that customer’s value can grow! 

 If you’re a big store and have hundreds of customers a day, the impact could be staggering if you began to lose those regular customers!

 “So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.”
     – Peter Drucker

A successful entrepreneur recently shared his management philosophy with me.
• Create a place where work is fun
• Hire management that has a positive attitude and people skills
• Build a team that works together to simplify and streamline processes
• Provide the best customer service possible

Four simple ideas that can make the difference between success or failure for any organization.

First of all, work should be fun. We ought to get up every day with the enthusiastic expectation of seeing our colleagues and taking satisfaction in making a difference for the organization. We spend more than a third of our lives at work. If it isn’t enjoyable we should look elsewhere. It is management’s job to instill a sense of joy in work by showing appreciation for what employees do.

Secondly, management sets the tone for the entire organization. Managers that have taken themselves and their work too seriously have a negative impact on morale because they tend to hold employees to strict (and often unfair) criteria. Flexibility and a love of people are what make good managers.

We have to see each individual as different. Having people skills requires us to coach when necessary but, more importantly, to play to strengths and ignore weaknesses.

Thirdly, being process focused is critical to organizational improvement and the key to providing what customers need. All processes must be seen as imperfect and the goal of management should be to get everyone working together to simplify and improve how things are done. The quickest path to successful process improvement is to solicit and use employee ideas.

Finally, we must be serious about customer service. Too many organizations just go through the motions when it comes to customers. They say they care but they seldom capture the input customers have that could improve the business. They measure satisfaction instead of customer needs. Customer satisfaction is neither a measurement of employee skill or customer retention. Lacking knowledge of what customers really want, organizations often muddle along not understanding why customers leave.

These are indeed certain and dependable principles for our uncertain times. Commitment to these four simple ideas will go farther than anything else to have motivated employees, retain long-term customers, and ensure a profitable business.

Copyright 2003. Reprinted with permission from www.hr.com,  your community for knowledge, expertise and resources.

Need help in this area? Try: Fun is Good
Who says work has to be serious all the time? Not the crew featured in this program, who show that happiness on the job comes when you discover your passion, bring a positive attitude and show people you care.