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How can you build a self-sustaining culture of service improvement? Here’s one essential key.
Everyone on your team must take responsibility for improving service. As a leader, you may encounter pushback on this idea. When you tell someone to take responsibility for implementing service improvements, you’ll likely hear all the reasons why it’s not feasible right now. You may even have a few of those reasons in your own head!
However, here’s the thing: limitations on budget, time, or manpower may restrict what your team and organization can do right now. But that doesn’t remove anyone’s responsibility for creating a better customer experience.
It’s up to everyone on the team to step up as best they can, even if it means leaving bigger, more expensive service initiatives for later. No organization can sustain a shining service culture unless every member of the team takes personal responsibility for the customer experience.
If you want to learn more about how to help your team step up with service, watch the video for additional insights and tips.
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Below is an Autogenerated Transcript
Who should take responsibility for making these improvements? Somebody out of the customer service department, it’s the head office, it’s the branch, it’s the other shift, it’s my boss, it’s the front line.
What I’m proposing is that rather than pointing the finger at somebody else, we should all be willing to have the finger actually pointed towards us and go, okay, what about you? What about you? What about me? What about each of us? And that includes when we’re working with our colleagues, and when we’re working with our customers, and when we’re home with our families, and when we’re out in public with strangers.
And some people, when they say this and I go, “Well, what about you?” They say, “Me?!”, “Me?” No, no, no, no. You don’t understand. You don’t understand my customers. They’re so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don’t understand my industry. It’s so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don’t understand my technology. It’s so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don’t understand my boss. He’s so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They’ve got some kind of an excuse, or a story or a reason about why not me. And what I’m suggesting is that we got to stop making excuses.
So here’s what I learned. When somebody says to you, “Yes, but…”, like, “Yes, service is important, but I need a budget.” “We need more money. “If you want me to improve service, you’ve got to give me more money.” Never argue. You could say to them something like, “You know? You’ve got a good point.” Some service improvements will cost more money, and we’re going to have to figure out how to budget for that. And there are some other improvements that we could make right now that don’t cost anything. We could simply change the way we answer the phone. We could simply clean up that corner over there that looks like a mess. We could simply…
If people say to you something like, “Well, yes, we want to improve services, but we’re going to have to think this out. We’re going to have to have a plan. We’ve got to really coordinate this over time.” Don’t argue. You could say, “You know, that’s a really good idea because some of these improvements are going to require us to do this in stages. We need to prepare. We need to start, we need to evaluate before we change it.”
But there are other things that could be done right now. And if they say to you something like, “Yeah, but, you know, we need other departments to get involved here, we can’t do this just ourselves.” I mean we’re going to need people from the other branch or from the head office or from IT or from HR We’re going have to think of this one. We got to work with our partners and other organizations. You could say “That’s a really good point because some of these are going to be complex. We might even have to have a committee, a steering committee for this.” It might take 12 months to really get full results. But there’s also some things that we could do on our own.
