Good Customer Service is Intentional

I was in a Customer Service training session this month and the subject of ‘how to WOW your customer’ came up. The facilitator asked participants for some examples of where we had experienced exceptional customer service. Surprisingly, and somewhat sadly, few hands went up.

The reality is that we rarely experience anything that remotely feels exceptional when we are consumers. My husband and I have noted that the clerks are our grocery store barely even make eye contact at the checkout – in fact, sometimes I feel like we are inconveniencing them when we go to the till!

I don’t believe any company sets out intending to offer bad service – its just that other priorities come up and managers sometimes assume that good customer service is a given. ‘Everyone know what good customer service looks like, right?’

The answer is no. If you want to offer good customer service, you have to be intentional about it. As a manager, you have to provide specific, practical guidance on what you mean by good customer service.

For example, you might specify that customer service means that all customers get greeted when they enter your store. It could be as simple as “Welcome to our store – how can I help you today?”. Why not take this one step further and specify that all employees greet customers throughout the store - this means that when an employee passes a customer in an aisle, they might ask if they need some help. And if a customer looks lost, an employee might not just direct them to the right aisle, but actually escort them there. At the till, you might specify that all employees greet their customers, ask if they found everything they needed and most importantly, thank them for choosing your store. You might specify that all employees leave their phones in their lockers so they are engaged in the store environment, and not what’s happening in their social media feeds, when they are at work.

Setting specific customer service standards is an important first step. However, to make it stick, managers also need to follow-through on these intentions. Managers need to look for and reward good customer service – when you see an employee doing what you want, acknowledge it! Let them know that they are demonstrating good customer service – and hopefully creating good shopping experiences for those customers. Engage your employees by soliciting ideas for improving customer service. Make it a topic of your weekly team meeting – take 15 minutes and brainstorm some additional things that your team could be doing. This is also a good time to do a shout-out for those team members who exemplify good customer service in front of their peers.

Good customer service is not an accident – it's intentional. Small things have the potential to make a big difference in the shopping experiences your customers. The devil is in the details!