Customer Service Tools

A Helpful Attitude Builds Relationships and More

2009-07-22T17:21:00.004+08:00

There are people who are very easy to ask help or assistance from. They always go to great lengths to be of help to a brother, a parent, a cousin, a classmate, an office mate or even a complete stranger. It comes naturally to these people. My mother is the greatest influence in my life about being helpful. She showed me by her own conduct and attitude towards people how it is to be helpful.

It simply came very easily for her to decide to help someone. I have seen this dozens of times. I saw how she helped a man get his wife out of the hospital after giving birth to their child. The man said he had nobody else to run to. The hospital will not release his wife because of unpaid bills. My mother took a pen and paper, wrote something and then just sent the man off to wait for her in the hospital. It was our family driver who told me later on that she paid the hospital bills and just sent our driver to give the receipt to the man. She can't even remember the man after.

Another case was about two girls with really dark skin and very curly hair. They came one morning to ask for leftovers because their mother left them for about a week with no food. Their mother never came back. I can't forget it becaue she did not give last night's left overs. She asked them to sit around our garden table. She took my spaghetti (My Spaghetti) she prepared for my breakfast and served it to the two girls with hot chocolate. She just smiled and told me there's always a loaf of bread on the table for me. These girls not only lost food, their mother just left them. Of course I was ok with a loaf of bread but actually I just got two slices because she packed the loaf of bread and a bottle of peanut butter (my brother's favorite peanut butter) and gave it to the two girls. It's cool. I can always get two slices of bread from the table...I know.

Being helpful is not something you get after a seminar. Knowing how to write a sales letter, maybe something you can get from a seminar. Building a website is something you can learn from a seminar. Baking a cake is something you get from a seminar. A helpful attitude is simply not a thing you pull out of a kit in a seminar. A helpful attitude has something to do with character.

I always like working with customer service, technical support or even marketing people with an attitude of being helpful. It's always easy working with them even for long hours. When you work for a company that provides maintenance service for large computer systems, you must be able to respond to a customer call any way you can. What if, the caller is not your customer?

A call coming in on a Friday one summer was made by someone asking help in trying to print a report in WordPerfect. I used to do a lot of writing in WordPerfect back then and then switch to PageMaker and then to Microsoft Word. I was always the last to leave as usual. While everyone was rushing to the door to go home (it was already 5:00 PM), I was holding this phone listening to a desperate female voice.

I can't recall her name anymore but let's call her Beth. Beth called two of their suppliers who provided them their computers. She was told to call tomorrow morning because nobody is in technical support (Of course, it was already 5:00 PM.). To get help she called all the business names in the phone book under computers and fortunately for her there was only less than ten of us on the page. To make the long story short, I work for a company that was listed close to the end of the page of the phone book.

Receiving the call I immediately switch to our standard response protocols of asking the identity of the caller and the company, verifying if they are currently enrolled in our service, and blah blah blah. She was not our customer and her company is not listed in our maintenance support program. The usual response to this is to go into a prepared script meant to get her interested in our maintenance services but I felt the desperation in her voice. I felt that she was not in the listening mode right then. I simply switched to my listening mode and just let her talk about her predicament.

Beth called because her boss who is the Vice President of Finance for their company have prepared some financial data in QuattroPro and wants to integrate the spreadsheets in the report written in WordPerfect. At that time only WordPerfect can do this without any conversion being done with QuattroPro spreadsheets. The report is suppose to be submitted and presented first thing in the morning. His boss is relying on her to finish the report that same night to give her boss time to review it before he goes home.

I walked her through the process of how to paste the spreadsheets in QuattroPro onto the WordPerfect document. There were so many data representing many tables to be pasted on the WordPerfect document. After she completed the task she requested that I stay on the line while his boss is reviewing the report she printed. I told her that I will hang up and wait for her call. I promised her I won't go home until she tells me that the report is okay. Of course more requests came after I hang up, like how to create charts, how to paste the charts into WordPerfect and how to insert charts into Harvard Graphics (at that time Harvard Graphics was a choice for presentations not Microsoft PowerPoint). Eventually, Beth did finish the report that night. I hang up and forgot about Beth and the call.

Several weeks after, my account executive comes to me and says: "Boss, remember that account we were trying to pursue for many months for our computer maintenance contract. Someone just called and requested for the maintenance contract. I haven't been approaching that client because the Vice President for Finance were giving us a hard time about our service fees which he said were higher than the other suppliers."

When I asked my account executive what brought about the sudden change of heart, he told me about the story of the Administrative Assistant working for the Vice President for Finance. Apparently, our proposals like all the other proposals submitted to the company were all expensive and were more or less of the same price levels. Finance have to decide on one eventually so the Vice President asked his Administrative Assistant which one she will choose. She chose us and the reason she gave was that somebody from the company helped her solve a technical problem even though she was not even a customer yet. Her logic was that if she can get help even if she's not a customer yet, how much more if she had a maintenance contract.

My account executive was thinking of sending her something to thank her but can't remember her name. I said, "Let me guess--Her name is Beth". His eyes brightened and asked me how I knew? I simply said, his "girl story" sounds like a Beth.

Technical Support is More Than Just Technical

2009-07-19T06:35:00.004+08:00

When you get that call from a customer about technical support, what comes to your mind? What conversation will be running in your head? Most of the time, what comes to your head are procedures, techniques and step-by-step process of resolving a technical issue by the book. I know. I did most of these things all the time.

There is also a lesson I learned about responding to a customer call. The lesson is: Not all calls for technical support are actually technical.

There were two identically configured servers serving a company manufacturing slippers for export. One December day it just refuse to make identical copies of their database into each others hard disk as it is suppose to. The call came in a few days before Christmas. I always get these calls a few days before Christmas.

The company cannot afford not to have their servers back up each others database because they are suppose to shutdown the servers on Christmas Day for maintenance and the back up ensures business continuity after the Christmas season. The main office in Japan will be cut off from their manufacturing plant completely without the servers. The company adapts a "Just in Time" manufacturing scheme which makes real time connection critical to the manufacturing division. Added to this is the fact that the new design of their system is just one of only three in the whole Asia region. This means its been tried only three times. There are no precedents yet of a downed server under this design. There are no ready answers if these servers crash. There are no references. There are no manuals to help us out once a crisis unfolds.

Our customer's representative naturally is the Manager for Management Information Systems. She was the one who recommended the system, the service provider of the database management system and of course the hardware (from us). She put her reputation on the line in putting the system in place, now it is about to fail not just her department and company but her personally.

The provider of the software and database system also arrived on the same day. They were the first to be informed of the problem. We were all in a huddle: the MIS team of the customer, software provider and us the hardware provider.

We knew that if the system will not be up by Christmas, top management will be looking for answers and eventually someone who will provide the answers for the fiasco. We did not need to hear from her who that someone will be because she knows the bucks stops at her door step.

I pulled out every information about our hardware including references to the same installation in other countries. It was functioning as it should. Our contacts from systems design and software development were not very sure if they can work around the software and the database. There was no technical reference to find out what exactly was happening to the software but there was also no reference that the problem is suppose to happen. In this industry, if the problem did not happen yet, it will not be in the manual. The software provider have not encountered the technical problem themselves. We were in a situation where we had no answers.

I was no longer concern about the technical issue, I was concern about her, the MIS Manager who trusted us. We are about to fail her. Technically, we can always blame the software but it does not help our customer, the MIS Manager. She will still be responsible if the system crashes due to a faulty systems design. We have to give her the confidence again not in the design or the system but confidence in us.

As soon as I got a chance to talk to our own Business Systems Manager who also is our most experienced systems engineer, I confirmed that there was no way to go around the problem based on the existing design. The system will not be online as long as we start up the system using the existing design. The problem shifted from tweaking with the design to simply getting the system up by Christmas. My solution was to let the database management system run on a single server but to do that we have to roll in a hardware with a lot higher configuration and possibly a server from a different brand because it was available. This server will be available within 24-hours. The alternative was to get it via Hongkong or Singapore which will take weeks. We have only several days before Christmas.

I was now asking our Business Systems Manager to stick his head out together with mine. I was recommending a course of action out of the books and totally against our protocols. We were recommending a solution that was not in our procedure plus I was about to recommend a brand replacement which was against marketing policy. Of course I got a call from our CEO himself a few hours after they got wind of what we were about to do.

The position I shared with my CEO was to choose between the protection of a brand or the retention of a customer. My boss of course responded by giving me the classic "chicken and egg" logic. If we lose the brand we have nothing to sell, if we lose the customer we have nobody to sell to. My response was, I can always reposition the same brand with the customer but we can not reposition customers in the greater scheme of our marketing strategy once we have lost them. Besides, if we lose the confidence of our customer, especially this particular customer, it does not really matter what brand we carry the customer will have nothing to do with us after this crisis.

We knew we could pull off technically the solution we had in mind, but we need also to act on our customer's fear. The fear of failure in the eyes of her superiors. The MIS Manager was up for more than 24 hours already. We were also going to be up almost twenty hours if she does not go home and leave the factory. The lack of sleep was increasing her anxiety and stress. It was difficult talking to her and she had no breakfast when we met her that morning. It was a good thing we brought along food for her and her team.

Looking back this is what we did:

We did our homework - Research, research, research
We immediately formed a research team of two (2) people who will research both software and hardware issues of the problem using the most specific information we got about the systems design. Since we always have a profile of our customers right down to their favorite dessert, it was easy for us to know what will immediately cheer up our MIS Manager. Sweet food and in that very specific situation a bit of protein (burgers) and hot drink (coffee). Food can always calm people down. Another thing I learned is that people are easier to talk to if they are munching burgers or doughnuts with steaming hot coffee. You think this is insignificant, try talking to someone who is hungry and without sleep for twenty-four hours about a problem she thinks you cause. I have not read about this approach in any customer or sales manual but it always worked for me for many years.

Informed Top Management - Yours and Your Customer
After we have the facts straight from direct interview of the customer and our research, we prepared a brief background of the issue, what we are currently doing to resolve the technical issue and sent it via email to our superiors. In the case of our customer, we have to ask the permission of the MIS Manager when to start informing her superiors, who will do the disclosure, how to deliver the information and how much detail to disclose. It has to be her call because she has a lot more at stake. Our own CEO however was already advised of the pertinent perspectives of the issues in the event our customer's superior starts calling. The main objective was to keep things in perspective and to keep stakeholders calm since there is no crisis to speak of yet.

Get the Blessing of Top Management
We informed our superiors of what we intend to do. I had no choice. I was asking them to roll in an asset worth thousands of dollars just as a stand-in solution. It was not a sale. There were no margins to speak of. It was just plain and simple first aid solution to help a customer. Only the blessing of top management can get the wheels rolling towards resolving the issue. An expensive one at that.

Get Other Stakeholders in ASAP
Finding the right hardware specification was just one part of the solution. The other part is the software that runs the database. Although we can handle the technical aspect of the hardware design, we still need to talk to the software guys to make the whole system work. We also need to talk to the MIS team of the customer to understand how the database is suppose to work for the company. All of them need to hear the plan because each of them have technical capabilities to execute different aspect of the plan.

Form a Unified Plan
Each team has a role to play but roles only work if it moves under a cohesive plan of action. You can learn how to come up with a great plan or you can learn it as you go but make one. Get all the stakeholders and put the plan together. More importantly execute.

I said a lot of things that really only boils down to a simple thing: Not all technical issues call for technical solutions. What seems to be a technical issue may just require some form of human understanding and discernment and acting on them.

Nurturing Relationship with Customers in the Face of Global Uncertainty

2009-01-07T14:03:00.006+08:00

The financial crisis sweeping the US and already sending tremors to most of the European Union is definitely one of many global uncertainties we hope we never have to face but unfortunately has now entered our front doors. There is no escaping this. Those who are still in denial and have not planned contingencies will find themselves with a company with no more assets or working for another owner.

During the Asian crisis, the only thing we could do was prepare for the worse. I was working for an IT company providing maintenance services to computer network systems. We had to get down to the painful process of re-assessing what we really have in terms of receivables, of projected sales and current cash flows. Managing a marketing group at that time was so painful because I was there witnessing and causing a lot of good people to leave. I trained these people and some may have to use what we have taught them somewhere else. The Asian crisis hit us at a time when most of our projections were already carved in stone. Dropping brands and replacing others were such an emotionally loaded process for some of my sales people who have built their relationships and competence around a certain product brand.

Even before that crisis, I already knew that the only way we can assure constant profitability and sustainability was to nurture a critical mass of customers. We have to do the math. We have to calculate to a certain degree of confidence how much each of our customers were contributing to our annual revenues: which ones provided the highest margins and which ones were the least costly to serve.

It was a learning process for both Marketing and Technical Support teams learning that less than 20% of our more than 300 customers under contract yielded 80% of our revenue in the maintenance service category. Maintenance services contributes 40% of our overall revenue every year. It also contributes the most profit margin after the first year of the contract.

We ranked and grouped them in such a way that those who constitute 80% of our revenues were now assigned to the most dependable Account Executives. No account executive was suppose to handle more than 10 of these accounts. I handled the most difficult accounts (accounts with mission critical servers).

It was a tedious process of looking into each of our accounts and doing the following:

Updated their profiles.
Determined the impact of the crisis on each of our customers (ability to acquire, expand, continue maintenance, recruit new people)
Current products and services we have delivered and projected to be delivered to the customer
Impact of the crisis on our own products and services and our ability to deliver them
Impact on pending orders (delivery period, price, discounts, etc.)

It was top priority to start doing courtesy visits instead of cutting down on the visits or customer calls.

In an economic crisis, sticking to the basics can force you to consider what you totally ignored in more complacent times--your existing customers.

To start off 2009, you will start getting the most simple and elementary notes on customer service: Using basic customer service strategy for customer acquisition and retention.

Let's get back to basics about acknowledging who are your customers.

When identifying Customers in the Customer Service perspective, you are only looking at two (2) major kinds: Internal and External Customers.

People in your organization who need your products or services to get their jobs done are your Internal Customers. On the other hand, people or organizations outside yours who require and buy your product or service to satisfy a need or solve a problem are your External Customers.

You need to know the distinction between the two for purposes of managing processes and measuring results. Both require respective Customer satisfaction metrics in some way to measure the quality of service or product delivery.

Your concern for Internal Customers is cost driven while for External Customers it is revenue and profit margin driven. The approaches to communication and service delivery will be different. The proximity of Internal Customers to you makes it relatively easy to deliver Internal Customer service.

External Customers however will require different media or channels to communicate to you. You will have no way to determine where your External Customers are, physically and in mind, at any given moment to specifically trigger communication.

If you are working for a retailing organization selling microcomputers and its accessories, and provide maintenance service, you will have Internal and External Customers.

Your Accounting Department may have people who will be using PCs that will need your maintenance service. It will be quite odd to tell accounting to go call your competitor for service you already have in-house.

Your External Customer may be a company, individual or any organization using PCs that may need your services. The quality of the delivery and the constitution of "good" Customer Service is hinged on the expectations of that Customer and execution of service.

Beyond the measurable results, the quality of the service or product is really based on how close we are to meeting and satisfying Customer expectations.

Why Do We Always Do The Basic Things Wrong?

2008-04-30T08:24:00.000+08:00

While helping doing an inventory of computer accessories and electronic gadgets in a retailing outfit, I can't help but ask the people manning the store how they keep track of their customers.

Guess what? They don't!

They don't keep track of where they are getting their sales: What product and who buys them? The last time I was in retailing was in 1998 selling the very exact things but I carried more than 50 brands with the likes of Seagate, IBM, Hayes, Microsoft, Lotus, Creative Labs, Intel, AMD, and a lot more.

I can't believe that in 2008, retailers are still doing a lot of things wrong. Well not exactly wrong, but they don't do the most basic things at all (at least to get the sales consistently coming).

Back when I was managing retailing operations more than 50% of our sales were from more than 30% of our repeat customers. Customers who buy more than two items or have bought the second time will always end up in our database together with information about what hardware or software they already have at home and at the office (in this order). Eliciting this "basic" information from customers have been integrated into the "script" of counter sales associates so that even if we don't get a sale we always have at least 5 to 10 new names in our database on that day.

Basic sales training will tell you that it is harder to get a new customer than encouraging repeat sales from an old customer but most retailing organizations ignore this. It is amazing. 9 out of 10 counter sales personnel will not initiate on their own a sales campaign for existing customers and more than half of retailing (specially small businesses) do not have such a campaign as a matter of policy.

If you want to test this, just walk into a computer store or even a hobby shop. You will most likely leave the store without the store clerk ever asking you about what you already have or how to get in touch with you about what you may need in the future.

Don't ask me if I tried it. I bought books, a new TV, a DVD player, a video game player, DVD rewritable discs, a headphone set, 2 pair of shoes, a file box, a knapsack, a LED flashlight, binders, and more since January of this year and not a single sales person or clerk ever ask me anything.

You don't really need much to get basic information from your customers. I designed a form that can be printed on a letter size paper (four forms on one side) that keeps information about customer's full name, phone, email, address (if you're lucky because some are not just concern about security they just find filling up forms tedious like me) or even mobile phone numbers. To encourage them to give information, I usually tell them that they get to be invited to free seminars sponsored by our partners and in some special occasions I get to give them freebies from our partners.

I also created a Microsoft Excel template to compile all of this information so that later on I can easily integrate that into mail merge or even a fax campaign template.

If you really keep track after a year, you will be amazed at the pattern that will be seen after collating all the information including sales from each of your customers. You can even predict which week in a month they will most likely order again their supplies (I used to sell printer paper and ink).

I like to hear the expression "You called me just in time!" from customers every time my telemarketers make their daily calls.

In my next blog I will show how a simple graph in Microsoft Excel help me advise a friend not to close shop just because customer traffic is not consistent in their new store location in the same shopping mall.

Gung Ho and Leadership

2006-04-26T11:34:00.000+08:00

The book "Gung Ho!" by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles is a must reading for those who would like to turn things around in an organization that either has lost its way or lost its steam. For many, this could be an eye-opener but for some who have been in the trenches of developing organizations and driving them to take the challenges of evolving, much of the teachings in “Gung Ho!” would be a given.

“Gung Ho!” teaches about the Lesson of the Squirrel: Worthwhile Work. People must understand that their work is important in the greater scheme of things. People in our organization must share this understanding and the goals that must be achieved. Our understanding and our shared goals must be ingrained in our values or are sustained by our values.

The second lesson of “Gung Ho!” is the "Lesson of the Beaver": In Control of Achieving the Goal. The book defines the elements of control as the ability to understand and know the realm within which you can act, to have full appreciation of every person in the organization, and to challenge and stretch the boundaries of uncharted possibilities within capacity of the people who will pursue the goals.

“Gung Ho!” closes with the third lesson: The "Lesson of the Goose": Cheering Each Other On. Cheering each other on means congratulations should be true whether active or passive. We must cheer or excite people to go on not just in the end but the whole stretch or process of achieving results.

You get a variation of all of these lessons in management classics like "In Search of Excellence" by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., followed by "A Passion for Excellence" by Thomas J. Peters and Nancy Austin, "Theory Z" of Professor William Ouchi of Harvard, "Mission Possible" by Ken Blanchard and Terry Woghorn and even from the more recent "Direct from Dell" written by Michael Dell himself of Dell Computer Corporation.

The one thing that “Gung Ho!“ does not openly teach but is skirting or is swimming around in the book is the key that binds all three lessons. The key that ensures the three lessons are understood and lived by. The key is leadership.

The individual character that grows from these lessons must be embodied in a person. It must be perceived in and lived by the one person who will demonstrate that these lessons are real and achievable. That person is the leader.

There are many shades of leaderships you may have witnessed and read about but the most common for me in my experience for the last 20 years seem to fall in different colors of grey in two personalities: The Boss and The Politician.

The Boss is the control freak: Always scared of losing control, always putting people down, always making everyone feel inadequate, always in on things however trivial or mundane, always the chairman of something, the only one who can do it, never delegates, all-knowing, the only one who can approve, only one who will be there, only one who is first, only one who is last, hates the young potential heir to the throne, the self-appointed expert of everything or the Only One of almost anything.

The Politician is the other side of The Boss: Always pleasing everyone, cannot make up his own mind, always seem to be doing something about nothing, always find someone to blame for anything, has always the right reason why it isn't him when things are bad, always find a good reason why it is him when things are good, wants to be boss but does not want to be accountable, the regular court jester, always congratulating but always scheming to get you out of the way, very good at teaching Gung Ho! but don't know where to start, always starting something but never finishing, finishing something but does not remember why he started it or he is simply the common variety "wimp" in an executive suit.

We need leaders who are generative. We need leaders who bring out the best in us. The most memorable interaction with leaders that defined who I am is not really the most astounding but they are indeed profound. These leaders are not the kind we see in the limelight and they seldom are. These leaders make us realize without trying who we can be or what we can be. Their mere presence calms us and assures us that things will be better.

We should seek out the leaders among us. Bring them out and follow them. Better yet, let us seek out the leader within ourselves let it define the rest of who we are. Let that leader bring us into the light allowing us to discern the best in us that has always been there.

Gung Ho, friends!

Driving Your Marketing Campaign with Simple Databases

2006-01-17T14:26:00.000+08:00

I always believe that business can't operate very long without organized or structured data of some kind.

You have these forms of data accumulating somehow in some point of your existence. The important thing is to recognize these forms of data and identify which ones are relevant to your operation and your future plans.

The data that will most likely be critical to you are those that tell you about the status of your revenue, the nature, rate and volume of your costs, and the profile of your customers.

If you are most enterprises, the last one will most likely not exist in your business. You might think you have it. Do check this out? You will most likely not have this data in a readily accessible and usable form.

Years and years ago, I use to work for a company that is into retailing of microcomputers and just about anything you can attach to it. I had zero budget for any campaign. I did have a team of ladies, however, in my telemarketing doing calls everyday just to sell supplies or what we categorically refer to as consumables.

These telemarketing ladies have a list of all purchasing officers or anyone who had authority to order supplies for their respective companies. The list was either a print out or an index card with a company name, purchasing officer's name and several phone numbers.

Each of the telemarketers kept their own list. You had to literally write on the list or cards to update it. If you filled up a card with scribbling, you were to get another one and staple it to the old card.

If it was the 1970s, a system like that would be considered efficient. I was working in the PC age in 1995. The system was not just cumbersome it was downright amusing watching the ladies update "their database".

One of the product brands (among more than 50) I managed was Microsoft Windows 95© at a time when 99.99% of Microsoft DOS© installations were pirated. Nobody believed in buying original software then. A law was just passed rendering stiffer penalties for piracy.

I have decided that a mail campaign was the most effective tool to use in creating demand for original software. The amount of material that the Business Software Alliance was sending on a regular basis proved to be good arsenal for the campaign. The only hitch was you have to pay the post office for every mail that is delivered.

Finance was very supportive as long as they don't give you cash. It gave me a whole new perspective what Finance was really all about. All they suggested was: "Go use the delivery trucks. They always go out on schedule".

After that, I got encouraging words like, "Don't dare divert the routes because we'll take that out of your supplies budget". I was pretty much left to device a no-brainer no-cost mail campaign.

To jumpstart the campaign, I have to get a list of targets. The list from the telemarketers was the only obvious choice. I still need to organize it in some way and then store it as an electronic file.

I decided to create a new format in Microsoft Excel© since most of the files like price list, product brands, and parts inventory were already in Microsoft Excel©, most of the administrative staff were already using it in some way. I requested the supervisor to put all their lists in Microsoft Excel© based on the available data from their cards.

Not all telemarketers were very good in Microsoft Excel© since nobody wanted to master it. There was really no need to do so since historically telemarketers never get to stay more than five months.

I had to design a crash course in Microsoft Excel© and Microsoft Word©. I was able to design a tailored training that needed only eight hours to complete. The actual data from the telemarketers were use to rapidly build data while still in training.

There was a lot of grumbling and visible resistance from the telemarketers. Getting them off the phone for a day for training naturally means they won't have sales for a day.

The real consolation was the personal directive that was given to all telemarketers by the president. Every one with direct contact with Customers by phone or over the counter must have training. The list in Microsoft Excel© although very crude at first finally got its first edition submitted in a single spreadsheet file.

So I thought about what I can do with the list in Microsoft Excel©. There was a slight problem with the distribution aspect of the mailers. I had to work out a schedule that synchronizes with the daily route of the delivery vans. The vans were assigned according to cities.

The Microsoft Excel© data must be able to sort itself not only according to cities but also according to streets right down to the building and floor. It was the only effective and efficient way to sort the mailers after they were printed and packed.

The problem with this realization was that I will be put in a situation where I may have to ask the telemarketers again to enter their data in another way. They now have to break up the addresses to specific cities, streets and buildings.

I drafted a letter in Microsoft Word© and use its "Merge" feature. By the way, if you do a little experimentation, you will find out that you can link your Microsoft Excel© data to your Microsoft Word© Merge Letter.

I just "linked" the existing spreadsheet data with my letter and I have hundreds of letters with each letter "personalized" to a specific customer right down to their nicknames and the exact product or service we were providing them.

The mailing labels were "no-sweat" since most word-processors like Microsoft Word© already have built-in label forms in popular sizes.

I only needed to be able to sort the data according to building, street and city. So I suggested my own spreadsheet template or form for telemarketers to fill up every time they get new information from customers. It was not really a problem since each telemarketer had her own workstation.

By using the spreadsheet I was able to sort the names of the customers according to the street and city, and then generate a mailing list. You can now sort out the mailers according to this mailing list and pack them accordingly for delivery.

Now all I have to do was talk to the Supervisor in charge of scheduling the deliveries. The supervisor knew the exact streets and city they will be going through. They normally have the schedule before five in the afternoon every day.

By knowing the exact building, street and city, I can actually sort my mailers according to the schedule and routes of the delivery truck. I simply asked the delivery assistants to pass by my cubicle and pick up the mailers for the day.

After a few weeks, I was able to work out the other details I can add to the spreadsheet customer list. I was now able to enter in the remarks column that this customer is just a supplies customer, this is an inkjet customer, and that a simple form ply paper customer. The unexpected benefit of this data is we can also put in the index column, when is the best time to call a customer.

We were now able to schedule our telemarketing activities according to the expected time supplies of customers start running out. Two or three days of the expected need, telemarketers are hot on the phones calling these customers.

We were able to level off inventory because of the predictable cycle of the need. We were always calling at the right moment.

My simple spreadsheet evolve into a more useful set of data we can safely call a database. This demonstrates how a little effort to record or document simple information about customers turn into an unexpected tactic for getting the customer at the right moment, and grudgingly without additional cost.

The really good thing about the experience is now the president of the company was suddenly supportive of what we were doing. Telemarketers were no longer complaining if we request assistance for data gathering campaigns in preparing for a product launch or for a market study.

Telemarketers knew that they will eventually benefit from the ideas we churn out. Telemarketers were earning from commissions from sales so they have every reason to support our efforts.

The other use I got with the database we have is as a negotiating tool with OEM distributors. While most of the computer retailers can say they have lots of customers, I can actually sight the exact number of customer we have who are regular customers and who are intermittent customers right down to what industry.

I can wave around pie charts of how many customers where in the financial services, manufacturing, shipping, education, government, and if you ask me more I can tell you how many are CEOs and how many are CFOs.

It does wonders especially if you are trying to entice OEM distributors to get your company to launch certain top of the line products every year and every quarter. It's a great boost to image. You can always let your OEM partner foot the bill if you can back up your market or customer profile with numbers and charts.

Microsoft, Microsoft DOS, Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Word are trademarks, tradename, and copyrights owned by Microsoft Corporation.

Customer Relationship: Building and Nurturing the After-sales Process

2005-11-26T15:10:00.000+08:00

My blog entitled "The Six Handicaps in After-Sales Customer Relations" listed the reasons why enterprises do not set up or develop after-sales customer relations. These reasons are also the handicaps in building after-sales customer relationships.

Now if you still need to know why you should even start the effort go read my blog on the "The 20 Customer Service Facts You Should Know" for a quick eye-opener.

Now lets work on finding the keys to build and nurture customer relationships.

Establish a Policy to Build and Nurture Customer Relationship
In organizations, unless you implicitly set the path towards a certain set of behavior you will have to rely on traditions to set the culture of customer service. Since it will take a long long time for government to set the rules on customer service the next best thing is to establish a policy.

If you want to take customer service seriously, you will have to set the policy and take the necessary steps to get what you want done in writing. You just can't walk in on your people and make an announcement that you are now a customer service-oriented organization. Get your people together choose a lead person and empower this person to get the right team to draft the policy.

You must have a good representation from the different business units or key process in your business. This ensures that the team drafting the policy will get inputs from a wider base of stakeholders who will either take the frontline or get involved in the delivery of your customer service program.

Of course, you will also have to define the broad areas of concern to set the direction and theme of your draft. The ideal path is to get a facilitator for this purpose specially if you don't have a strategic plan yet.

Design, Plan and Build a Customer Service Program
Once you have a policy document, you will have to do a roll-out. This is another way of describing the launching of your policy by getting the stakeholders together and announcing that the official copy of your policy document is out. Most organizations simply hand out the document but it has more impact if the owner or chief executive make the formal announcement before it is actually handed out. If you think it is expensive to be handing out copies to all then just get everyone in one place and give the official copy to the supervisors or department heads in the presence of everyone.

After the roll out is done, the next step is to get each of the business unit or departments to come up with their own customer service program within their units or departments. You can use the process in the policy drafting to build the teams in each of this units or department to come up with the program.

You can use my blog entitled "The Six Dimensions in Customer Service" on building a customer service program as a guide to start the process.

Choose and Appoint a Champion
If you are serious about building relationship with customers through your customer service program you need somebody who will push this program across your enterprise or organization. Not only will this person push the customer service agenda in every corner of your enterprise, this person must also be empowered to tell you things as they are and not sugar-coat the content of your feedback mechanism.

You have to designate a champion and just like the roll out of your policy document, you will have to anoint this champion in front of everyone. By doing so you not only reinforce your resolve but you will actually tell everyone that you installed someone to ensure your program will stay in place.

Decide to Take a Leadership Role
Who you are in the context of your policy and your customer service program will determine if you are serious about putting value to customer service or paying lip service to it.

You can take this as a challenge or as a good excuse not to start your customer service program but the bottom-line is no serious effort will begin unless you take the lead.

You are the embodiment of your policy, your quality metrics, your customer service process, and your enterprise as a whole. Your people must see you in action, your decision must be a reflection of your policy, and your internal process must operationalize this policy and this can only be institutionalized if you have the leadership to make it so.
In my more than 10 years managing customer service programs I had bad, frustrating, exciting and truly memorable days but not a single dull moment. Not one believe me.

Customer Service Programs are day-to-day endeavors. You build it a day at a time.

2005-10-18T12:14:00.000+08:00

Only Relevant Comments On this Blog Site

Only comments made in this blog site relevant to the subject where the comment is published will remain in this blog site.

I will appreciate if comments made are specifically made to contribute to the blog. If the comment is entered or published merely to declare that the site is "cool", "interesting" or whatever and then leaving a link, it will not be considered relevant.

What is relevant are the following:

A case study, brief anecdote or an example
demonstrating the subject.

A personal experience demonstrating or related to the
subject.

An excerpt from an article you own, wrote or published related to the subject where the comment is published.
Your own views about the specific subject or your own suggestion of better ways to improve customer service.

I really don't mind if you place a link within your comments back to your website as long as the comments are relevant and your website provides the relevant content related to the specific blog where your comments are published. If I check your website and the content is not relevant to Customer Service or any subject related to Customer Service, your comments will be removed.

Virgilio Paralisan
www.customerservicetools.blogspot.com

The Six Handicaps in After-sales Customer Relations

2005-09-26T15:31:00.000+08:00

Experience and research show that nurturing existing customers and building customer relationship with these existing customers are cheaper strategies than regularly looking for new ones.

Many know this to be true whether you are a small or medium enterprise (SME) or a large one. But, for the life of me, I still see more enterprises making enemies out of their existing customers and getting new customers who buy from these enterprises simply because these customers are ignorant about the questionable practices of
these enterprises.

Most of the selling process of small and medium enterprises are purely focus on making the first and only sale from every customer that literally "walks in" the stores. After this first sale, practically no more interaction takes place between the sales people and the customer.

The Six Reasons for Most SME's Reluctance or Inability to Establish After-sales Contact

There are many reasons for these reluctance or inability to establish contact. Let's start from the more common kind of business: The enterprises that have products, services and people dedicated to the more shameful side of customer service or the absence thereof. By the way, there are a lot of this kind around.

It's both a boon and a bane. A boon because it provides almost unlimited opportunity for the good ones to shine; while it's a bane because it erodes the "trust" element in customer perception for not only the enterprise in particular but for the whole industry where you belong in general.

Ok, back to the "more shameful side of customer service or the absence thereof."

There are a lot of reasons why this kind of enterprises avoid after-sales contact:

Reason Number 1

The first and more obvious reason for not pursuing after-sales relationship is that there is really really and absolutely no "after-sales" process to speak of. There is simply none and the enterprise has no plan of putting any in place. You will not see any visible process being followed or any policy governing their customer service or any service for that matter.

These guys really don't have the resolve, the money to put it up or are purely scam artists with one strategic goal in mind "to get as many of us to give our money to them at zero cost if possible and then run before any of us becomes the wiser!"

I suggest you read my blog on "Indicators of Weak Customer Service Programs" to stay away from this kind of enterprises or better yet avoid being a clone of these enterprises.

Actually, if you become a member of the bunch of businesses with bad customer service, you actually make my work easier teaching the better enterprises to be good at the basics of impeccable customer service. By being bad, it's pretty easy for people like me to distinguish and demonstrate what is truly an excellent customer service program
from the really rotten ones.

You help me simply by providing me a long list of examples of what they should not be doing to customers. Believe me, the list I have now is long enough but with your help I might just get it to be encyclopedic.

Reason Number 2

Here's another very common reason for avoiding after-sales service. The product or service is simply bad, poorly designed, poorly made or a truly distasteful concoction of all of those I mentioned.

Your frontline sales or support personnel just don't have ready answers for problems that your product or service create either for your customer or for your own people. They know that these problems will not die down simply because you are still producing items or delivering service that are inherently bad.

Your people are just doing what a normal human being does a "fright-flight" reaction.

They're scared out of their wits facing customers or picking up the phone to answer customer complaints with all that angry and well-motivated "new enemies" after each sale and the unlimited potential for consumer protection litigations to boot.

They make the sale and hope the customer forgets their name and their face.

No amount of good communication and public relations will improve a bad product and a poorly delivered service. In my blog entitled, "The 20 Customer Service Facts You Should Know" I outlined 20 common service facts that guide me in designing customer service programs.

Customer Service Fact number 2 states: "300% more people will know about your bad service from dissatisfied Customers than your good service from satisfied customers."

It simply means that you will have 300% more coverage in terms of reputation for your bad customer service than from your good one (if you have any). Your bad reputation simply precedes your other (or worse) reputation whatever that is.

Reason Number 3

Here's another reason that's related to the previous one: Your people do not have the capacity or competence to build much less nurture after-sales customer relationships.

Any organization to function must build certain sets of skills and knowledge to ensure that jobs get done in the quality and degree acceptable to its stakeholders like your customers. People aren't born with telephone skills or problem-solving skills. In fact, every parent sure wish each baby brought out of this world came with a manual of some kind.

Training can make considerable difference in the absence of a seamless process for building relationship with customers. Unfortunately, very few invest in training (probably because most of their people never stay long enough to finish it).

Many years back, I got invited as a Marketing Consultant for a computer retail store. The first day I showed up, I notice how most of the sales and technical support people kept their distance from the phone every time it rings.

Most of the technical support guys avoid the phone like the plague. According to them, most of those customers calling in are yelling at them because the sales people either can't explain their problems about their newly bought computers or are not calling them back. The sales people in turn wasn't picking up any ringing phone because the customer complaint is about technical matters they know nothing about and the technical guys aren't very keen on explaining these technical matters to them.

Training is important because a well-designed training of any kind delivers real skills, knowledge and competence. With these skills, knowledge and competence comes confidence. The very confidence they need to pick up that ringing phone or walk into a customer's office with a purposeful gait.

Reason Number 4

You're getting the wrong people for the job of building or nurturing customer relationships. This is another reason you can't rely on your people to do the job even if you did train them. You have to find the right character for the job. The keyword is "character".

This is one thing I try to do right the first time--Getting the right people for the job.

In reality, most are doing everything the first time and doing it wrong all the time. Like this is the first time I interviewed a woman, this is the first time I interviewed an ex-seminarian, ex-con, ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, ax murderer, my mother-in-law, Jude Law, and ad nauseum...You're just not too good with people.

Personally, if you fit in this mold I suggest firing yourself. Mind you, this is not first time I actually advised a client in a consulting engagement to fire himself and get somebody to act as CEO. The CEO was very bad with people I suggested he votes himself chairman and get somebody professional as CEO.

Nowadays, not only do you need to find the right "character" but also the right attitude to work with a team. Customer interaction is now becoming complex in this age with the advent of many avenues for communication like the Internet, websites, email and all that you will most likely need people with different cultural and technical background.

Imagine all that then getting them to meld as one team. Honestly, it helps if you have a good compensation package if you use teams to build customer relationship. We'll get to the topic of compensation soon enough.

You need to read my blog on building customer service teams entitled what else "The Team" for more insights on building service-oriented teams.

Reason Number 5

You aren't paying your people in proportion to the expected output or the quality of work demanded of them. Ever heard this expression" "Hey, I didn't sign up for this!"

This is another reason why sales or service personnel don't put up with the stress of customer interaction or after sales relationship. The level of stress brought about by a culture of bad service is enough incentive to leave a job even a high-paying one.

In a survey done early 90's among Asian employers, it was found out that pay is not the primary reason why people leave their jobs although this is the number one factor for applying for one. Most of those who leave believed that there must be a direct correlation between their worth as contributing member of the organization and their pay.

This means that the compensation package does not necessarily have to be high per se to keep people but must have
a direct relationship to their perceive worth and contribution to the organization's growth.

In the workplace, people just shut off customers if they want to survive the stress of the day. This starts a vicious cycle of low-key avoidance strategies to an all out apathy towards customers.

When you have a disproportionate compensation package for frontline people who are suppose to initiate and manage
after-sales relationship, you are, in a manner of speaking, creating the correlation between pay and bad service.

Personally, I think this trend will not change any time soon. I'm referring to both the leaving and the bad service.

The last reason I have for the inability to nurture after-sales customer relationship has more to do with the boss or the entrepreneur which is ...

Reason Number 6

The business is not creating the environment nor the culture that puts the message across that customer relationship is a strategic concern for the enterprise.

Most enterprises really revolve around the character of the founder or the entrepreneur. Much of the discernible characteristics of the enterprise is much a reflection of the entrepreneur rather than the culture of the collective character of people making up the enterprise.

Entrepreneurs tend to hire people that are mirrors or reflections of their own character or a child of similar personal or cultural background.

Surprisingly, this is very true for male than for female entrepreneurs. Female entrepreneurs tend to look for personalities that complement rather than compete with their character.

Even I hate to admit this. This trend alone may explain why female entrepreneurs tend to get this entrepreneurship thing right the first time. They just have the knack for getting the right people at the right moment.

When the views and actuations of the entrepreneur says that customer relationship is not important it comes across more clearly and with far more impact than a policy and operations manual in a three-ring binder.

My next blog on The After-Sales Customer Relationship will be on building and nurturing a process for such relationship. I will cite specific examples how I get around all the six reasons above.

The 20 Customer Service Facts You Should Know

2005-08-05T20:16:00.000+08:00

In my more than ten years in the service business and information technology, I have come to accept 20 facts in my customer service world. You may think otherwise about these facts, but I always get in trouble when I take for granted any one of them.

I also noticed that the more conscious I am about these facts, the better I manage my team, the more refined are the customer service trainings I designed, and the more proactive my approaches to customer service becomes.

One of the best bonuses I get is that I seldom get unresolved issues haunting me in the future.

Here are my 20 Customer Service Facts:

1. If you keep tabs of your resolution rates related to complaining Customers, you will find out that less than 10% of dissatisfied Customers will actually file a complaint or let you know about it.

This is one reason why I always make it a commandment in my sales or customer support teams to call the Customer 3 or 5 days after delivery or completion of service.

You should not wait for them to tell someone else about the problem before you have a chance to know about it.

Most problems really are just a result of a Customer not being educated enough to harness the benefits from your product or service.

Show them how!

Besides, if your service or product provides him or his company an edge, why would he tell his next door neighbor why he has the edge.

He knows his competitor is going to get hold of it somehow, he just doesn't want it happening anytime soon.

2. 300% more people will know about your bad service from dissatisfied Customers than your good service from satisfied customers.

Sales people have always observed this pattern about Customers.

If you are not that keen yet about this trend better watch out because you might end up hearing it from your competition, after he gets your Customer.

Worst! He gets your biggest Customer.

Remember that expression being "the last to know."

Not the song, the expression.

This is one fact that is not funny when it's eating up your market.

You will lose Customers and it's usually too late to know why.

If your Customer is a member of an association or a club, you can bet that half of the membership already know about the bad news.

You can also bet that nobody will hear a whisper about how you have dealt with the problem later on.

But that's a different story altogether.

3. Although Customers seldom make their complaint known, dissatisfied Customers will most likely find and meet Customers with the same experience.

They will talk more about the problem and will tend to attract more people who will listen.

This explains the previous fact.

Haven't you notice that you tend to have more listener with bad news than good ones.

The uglier it is, the more glued the audience will be.

You always find more headlines with ugly...No horrible news than happy ones when you watch TV.

You notice one other thing. You never turn the TV off!

You're glued!

4. If you can resolve an issue or fix a problem of a complaining Customer, 80% of this kind of Customers will come back and will most likely make a purchase again.

You will increase this percentage to 90% if you act immediately upon notice of the complaint.

Logic would have told us that if you mess up, you should get fired as a service provider or supplier.

You don't get fired. You get 8 out 10 of them coming back!

Why?

In a crisis or if some problem comes up, this is the only opportunity you have of showing a Customer that there is an organization, process and people behind your service or product.

This is assuming you indeed have an organization, process or people behind your service or product.

By solving the problem the Customer sees you at work.

They see procedures being followed.

They get calls.

They get interviewed about a problem.

And, they see real people not machines doing something for them.

They see. They don't hear about it or get told about it.

They clearly see an action in progress.

This action in progress allows your Customer to size you up.

Know what you can do. See your capabilities.

This is why I firmly believe that an opportunity to serve under these conditions should not be passed up.

5. No technology can be a substitute for human interaction.

Even if the technology is the only contact with Customers, certain needs will eventually require some form of human contact.

The human physiology will always seek out some form of affective human interaction.

Have you heard about the "crib syndrome" that afflicts only infants?

It's been suspected that this syndrome normally happens if the baby does not experience a nurturing environment or more specifically human touch.

As early as infancy, the human physiology already exhibits the craving for human touch.

6. Treating Customers badly for any reason will eventually carry costs and consequences.

I don't believe in karma or all that esoteric beliefs.

I do believe in action and consequent reaction.

As early as high school, you've been introduced to this concept in Physics.

Human beings have a funny way of getting back at you.

Animals are more predictable because we already know how predictable or unpredictable they are.

Human beings are complex. Even if you understand their habits they don't behave exactly as expected in the same situation all the time.

When you hurt a Customer by not serving him or her well, you will be remembered.

It has nothing to do with selling principles or organization. It has to do with human nature. Pain has a way of making our memory sharper and our recall more instinctive.

The reckoning will come. It may not be now.

It will come!

More than 10 years of dealing with Customer made me a believer in this phenomenon of eventual reckoning.

7. Your reputation and credibility are directly proportional to the quality of your service and eventually to the quality of your Customer relations.

If you have good customer service, you tend to have more people talking and hearing about it. Quite naturally, you tend to have more customers. It is just consequential that you will have some kind of reputation. Hopefully you have a great reputation rather than a bad one.

Find or better yet develop the right process and team to ensure that you nurture good relationship with your customers. The stronger your relationship with customers, the more solid and enduring will be your reputation and credibility.

Your reputation is built on the relationship you keep. Who is more inclined to believe you than people or organizations who know you--Your Customers.

8. The environment in which you will establish good impressions with Customer on first contact will always be stack against you.

Remember that the Customer is the person who sets the time, the date, the place and the agenda of the visit (if you let him).

If the Customer tells you to see him in his office or place of work, he again controls the atmosphere and physical environment.

It is rarely that the Customer will see you all excited about what you are about to say, unless of course he initiates the call or ask for the appointment.

The necessity of creating first impression is lesser if the Customer initiates the call or meeting.

The Customer has more or less a clear grasp of what he wants from the meeting. He expects you to validate his wants or needs.

Normally, if the customer initiates the call he would already have certain level or scale of expectations. It's like already having 100 bonus points in his pocket for you. What you do or don't do during the meeting will just give him an incentive to keep the 100 bonus points for you or take out 5 points here, 10 points there until you got just about 50 bonus points to nothing.

If you're initiating the call, what you are really doing is grunt work. I don't care if you have undergone gazillions of sales training. If you are initiating the visit or call, everything is stack up against you.

Good luck!

9. Sophisticated Customer service or retention programs fail simply because it lacks appreciation of the universal principle of good business and good manners.

Most support services for computer systems are failing in their service ratings not because their core services are bad it's because they lack the common sense to do the simple things.

Service call request coming in by phone are not handled well.

Customers complain that they keep repeating themselves to people at the other end of the line.

Service personnel can not remember details of their complaints.

Customers' repaired units are delivered with films of dust on its surface. Smudges of greasy fingerprints on clean surfaces.

Service personnel forgot to take their trash with them or fail to return the Customer's equipment in its proper place.

Common sense dictates that you treat Customers the way you expect others to treat your daughter, son, wife or mother. Of course you will find this far from any form of common sense if you are a wife beater or child molester.

It's the reason why I always choose happy people with lots of high self-esteem after I pick them out for their common sense.

Happy people tend to have better disposition and are easier to train. They tend to handle stress better specially those created by customer interaction.

10. In an existing Customer service program, you will lose your best employee specially those with sound judgment first, (followed by the team if he is a team leader) if you don't nurture the right working environment.

Good workers specially those with sound judgment and really competent ones know what is a healthy working environment for them and their team. These are the people who are not afraid to leave when they think things are not right for them, for their colleagues and their customers.

These are the kind of people who can easily build strong relationship with customers.

There's also one good thing about these types of employees. Team members tend to be loyal to them if they become team leaders or are team leaders. They will do almost anything for them. This is usually the reason why you tend to lose your best team members right after the team leader leaves.

Take care of your team.

Create the best working environment for them specially after the launch of a successful campaign (any campaign!).

Rewards must be tailored to what motivates your team.

Remember this: Money maybe the best reason for taking on a job but it is seldom the first or significant reason for leaving one.

Team leaders (the Good Ones!) who conduct their own exit interviews of team members who leave will seldom hear money as the reason for leaving a job. If your team member refuses an exit interiview with you, you are probably the reason for leaving the company or the team.

11. The people who should be convince about your value proposition and your Customer service program should be the very people who will deliver the proposition and manage the program in the first place.

If the frontline staff themselves do not believe or have little faith in the company's customer service program, you cannot expect them to deliver the quality of service expected by customers.

On a staff-to-customer level, the customer service staff will have little empathy and will generally have little motivation to go the "extra" mile to help customers.

Frontline staff who do not believe in the very service they deliver will have no motivation to give the company feedback and in most instances will generally "conceal" the actual conditions prevailing in the field.

You must have a credible customer service program. The kind that make sense to your own people.

12. The sincerity of any Customer service program is directly proportional to the cohesiveness and effectiveness of the support teams involved in its management.

A company who is confident in the capability of its service team don't worry so much about their service contracts. Service teams that deliver according to customer standards seldom get the opportunity to handle customer complaints because problems never get out of hand too often to become a customer's problem.

You must invest time, training, tools and other resources to make your team cohesive and effective.

If you have an honest-to-goodness customer service program you will spend more time making your customer support teams more effective rather than tinkering around with the quot;waiver" or "non-liability" clause of your service contracts.

I have seen so many service contracts in my career from really good to really "plain paper useless". There are contracts that have so many waivers and clauses to pre-empt damage suits that it practically ties the hands of service personnel even if they sincerely want to help customers.

And let me add that the sincerity of any Customer Service program is also directly proportional to the distance of the CEOs office to the company's legal counsel. You really and truly are sincere if you see your lawyer less and less about customer issues.

Companies with dismal customer service performance have lawyers busy either suing customers for unpaid bills or are defending themselves against consumer rights litigation or non-performance liabilities.

13. A problem or Customer complaint is an opportunity to do better and to reinforce your Customer service policy and program.

Nothing can subject a customer service program to the most rigid acid test but a live customer making a legitimate complaint.

A good service program kicks in almost automatically upon the first contact with a complaining customer. Information about the complaint is immediately gathered while the customer's profile and details of the related purchase is reviewed. An account manager is immediately informed and made accessible to the customer.

The whole chain of events from the first receipt of the customer contact will show the customer real people acting on the complaint. The customer will be able to discern from the flurry of activities that a system is in place to assist him. Support people return calls to customer and provide feedback of the steps taken to resolve the issue.

14. A review of actions to respond to complaining or dissatisfied Customer will provide an opportunity to look into your company's internal process related to Customer Service or service delivery.

This is suppose to be a very obvious conclusion but surprisingly most of the process to support customer complaints were not really designed to resolve issues. More often the process is really a complex procedure to either evade responding or discourage customer from lodging their complaints or raise issues.

A bad process even if reviewed a hundred times is still a bad process. No amount of review will change the outcome of a bad process. Ever heard of "garbage in, garbage out"?

Good service providers know that the key to delivering good service every time is the quality of the core service, the process, the tools and the team.

When a unique incident, issue or problem comes up to test your process, a review must immediately be conducted to find out how the process responded. Did each of the component seamlessly worked from one sub-process to another? Is there a bottleneck or glitch somewhere? What conditions led to the glitch?

This is suppose to be really common sense unfortunately this "review" is not really that common.

Now we hear about quality control circles, process improvement, ISO that basically starts their methods with a review of process. Today they call it fancy names like quality assessment, quality audit, system assessment, system audit, process assessment, and all that high-sounding terms which are really designed more to make consultant's work appear complex and their costly bills easier to swallow.

15. The finer is your definition of market niche the more focus your Customer service will be.

This may not come from common sense, but marketers should already realize that the more clearly you understand your customer, the more specialized you tend to design your sevices around their needs. This will eventually lead to a more defined sets of distinct services for just a specific need.

A good example of this is the way Internet service providers have evolved. Before, there was really no distinction between a person using Internet services in the office and those using Internet at home. Now, you have corporate accounts, home market, and even mobile users.

Service providers, at least the most dynamic ones, are learning that they can no longer offer a smorgasboard of services and attach a single price tag for all types of customers. Customers now truly perceive a value relevant to his unique situation and buys in only from providers who can understand this perceived value.

Service providers, fortunately for customers, are no longer having a "me-too" pricing strategy. They know that those who gets the price pegged right the first time dominates a niche almost rapidly specially in a service that is technology-driven.

Marketers are now fine tuning their ability to define their niche not from a concept of who is a customer but from data taken from a customer base that they now own. This enables marketers to develop products and services that are more focus.

16. The more complex your offering the broader will be the scope of your Customer service programs.

Some customer service programs are actually born out of a service concept catering to a broader customer profile. In essence, the definition of the service is a consequence of an assumption that the customer has multi-level and multi-faceted needs. The result is a process that accommodates so many contingencies.

The customer service program is not really one homogenuous program but a complex combination of sub-programs intended to respond to different customer needs.

This condition is not inherently bad. The real issue is capital expenditure and logistical requirement. The organization that has an abundance of knowledge resource and other resources will not find customer service a real challenge even if it has a complex offering.

The challenge is how to cover a broad spectrum of customer needs without wearing yourself too thin.

17. Between a prospect and a Customer, a Customer can do more damage to you by simply not doing anything.

In terms of value, a prospect has zero Customer Value. He is not a Customer, he is still a prospect. You have already invested in a Customer, that investment will go to waste if the Customer stops interacting.

I had a Customer covered by a maintenance contract for their mainframe computer. When he came across a problem related to our service, he simply allowed the contract to lapse.

This provided an opening for a competing service provider to offer an alternative.

He got our proposal for a renewal and just sat on it for more than 30 days.

See, the Customer simply did nothing and I still lost the account.

18. The foundation and institutionalization of a good Customer service program is hinge on the creation of a seamless process and the systematic documentation of each key components to ensure consistent delivery and maintenance of quality standards.

If you are having problems keeping your customer service up, you are most likely having the following:

Customers can't understand the terms and conditions of delivery.

Your own people can't seem to understand the terms and conditions of delivery.

Service personnel don't seem to follow the same method of initiating service delivery and can't seem to improve their resolution rate or response time.

You keep losing people at a time when they are suppose to be competent enough and can't seem to get the same level and quality of productivity from their replacement.

You are responding to the same form or nature of the complaint at ever increasing frequency and still have your service people getting the response wrong every time.

You can't seem to get your competence training up and running at a level that does not demand too much time from your most senior and experienced team leaders and members.

You don't have the right people for the job.

You're delivering the wrong service to your customer because what you are delivering is not what your customer expects.

Most of these common and irritating issues I have solved by adapting only two (2) key strategies: creation of a seamless process and systematic documentation.

The identification and creation of tools plus the design and development of truly effective skills training will evolve from these two (2) strategies.

19. Two (2) key roles must be present to perpetuate a seamless process:

The leader who will be responsible for the process; and The key person or persons responsible for the results.

The definition, selection and installation of the right leader for a good team will ensure the integrity of the customer service process. A competent and effective team will ensure that service standards are achieved.

Each member of a team in a process is responsible only for the result of component of the process assigned to him. The team leader must be responsible for the process end-to-end because he is the one with a broader or over-all perspective of the customer service process.

20. When all things are equal and perfect, meaning product, service, process, organizational structure, technology, and communications, your weakest link will be two kinds of people:

The leader responsible for the integrity of the process; and, the team responsible for the quality of the results.

The weakest link in any system or process is the human component. This part of the system or process is the less predictable aspect of managing a system or process. People as part of system is simply the most volatile and also the most dynamic.

The contingencies designed for any system will almost always address the doing or undoing of human nature or its consequence. The only time human nature is less a consideration in contingencies is when the effects of the environment or extreme outcome of natural calamities are factored in.

In the customer service perspective, we focus our attention only on the leader and the team.

It is important that you build a good team and manage it well.

Stick to basics. Choose your team leader well and help him build his team.

You just completed a whole series of excerpts from my e-book, "The Six Dimensions of Customer Service."

Source: "The Six Dimensions of Customer Service". VY Paralisan. Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.

Dimension Six: The Team

2005-08-05T11:36:00.001+08:00

You now have a good service or product concept.

Delivery of this service or product is clearly defined and understood by everyone. You have the right tools to ensure that the service or product is easy to deliver and will be done right all the time.

In spite of competition, you know you have to do it better and in the process make a profit by managing your customer service well.

You have the cash and capital in the right proportion but you cannot do this alone.

If this isn't a business, you will just probably be worrying about punching in and hope nothing messy is going to happen before the day ends.

Unfortunately, this is not a job and you are not a rank-and-file.

The business is going to be managed. It's you or someone else.

You need to deliver your customer service, systems are in place and tools will be use, the whole thing is going to be done over and over, you simply cannot do this alone.

You need a group of people who know what they are doing.

This group will do it because they understand their role in the whole process of customer service.

They are trained to deliver and support customer service.

In all likelihood, they will define the quality standards of delivery, setup the system to support your process, ensure continuity and consistency by documenting your customer service process, and develop the training program for your future staff.

You need a dynamic team!

Why Build a Team

Society is increasing pressure from organizations not only for increase profitability and productivity but also the expectation that organizations must also improve the quality of life.

Business enterprises want profitability; government aims to effectively deliver services; while not-for-profit organizations try to alleviate social or economic inequity including the effective management of the environment.

Whatever the aims the incentive to use human resources as little and as much inthe most effective and productive way is great.

Today, the use of teams is gaining ground to answer these aims.

Whether in corporations, in special police teams, in the armed forces or in foundations, the use of teams to deliver cost-effective completion of projects and the assignment of project managers as team leaders will continue to be a primary alternative for project management.

Let's start building your team!

Good Teams

It is not a team if it is not a good team.

So what are the traits of a good team?

Here are the most prominent traits of really good or effective teams:

Team members tend to work more effectively together than they would if they were working individually or alone.

Clear sense of itself as a special group but still has the capacity to interact positively with other groups in the organization.

Communicate clearly with one another and effectively across the organization.

Cultivates and negotiates positive assumptions and beliefs among team members.

Just because you have a list of what constitutes a good team, you may think that you can simply go around your organization and pick out a group as a team.

You build teams. You don't stumble into them.

Some actually believe that they can handpick people, designate a leader and give the group a name like Team A to come up with their team.

Like anything else, doing something you know nothing about is worse than doing nothing. Take a surgeon's advice: First do no harm!

The Team Leader

The team leader can make or break a team just as a team can make or break a project. The challenge to management is electing the best man to fit the shoes of a team leader.

You just can't set any criteria that you like or your comfortable with when defining who will be best suited for the role.

Take time to know and understand a team leader's role in team building and management. The following broad roles should give you a hint:

making and keeping the goals clear

defining or setting measurable performance

managing relationship within and without

identifying or creating opportunities for team members

building confidence, strengthening commitment, and developing skills

If you want a list of more specific tasks a team leader does, here are some:

facilitating and preparing project plans

monitoring the progress of team projects

preparing reports of team progress

managing flow of information across the organizational hierarchy

facilitating and acting in behalf of the team to get support and resources from stakeholders

keeping track and documenting changes in project specs or team process

developing learning systems within the team

Sorry if I'm taking up team management in lesser detail here. This e-book is not for supervisors or team leaders.

The content in this e-book is for the business owners or management executives responsible for managing or developing marketing or customer service programs.

The Members

When choosing the composition of the team or making a selection of members, I prefer basing the selection on the knowledge and skills that each will bring into the team.

A certain degree of expertise or knowledge can help a lot if the team is task to undertake a specific function or role whether organizational or project-based.

In a team, one or more may have to possess problem-solving skills and make decisions.

If you work with projects long enough you will realize that most of your team members will acquire a certain level of problem-solving skills as they gain experience.

Of course, it will be a distinct advantage if one of the members have both problem-solving and decision-making skills at the formative stage of team creation.

Members of the team must be able to communicate with each other clearly because communication is the key to making diverse backgrounds work together.

To be able to know what skills are required for the job, you must be able to define the team's objective and the functions that will eventually define its structure.

Define Team Roles Clearly

Knowing your role in projects is almost obvious. In reality, very few things done in projects are the way they are because of being obvious.

Defining roles in projects is important but unfortunately this is one of the most basic things that a neophyte in projects will almost certainly take for granted.

Defining roles as clearly as possible at the start of the project will save you time and most of all credibility.

Roles must be defined right after selecting and creating the team.

Problems brought about by poor or absence of clear team roles include bad coordination, assignment of the wrong skills to a task, extended deadlines or plain failure to complete deliverables.

What I'm trying to say is you cannot wait for the team members to define their roles or let it evolve.

The function of the team is dependent on the very specific objectives or clearly defined tasks set by the organization.

Management or the team manager must not let the team decide its function or its purpose.

Teams cannot draw guidance from organizational culture. To do so will leave the team lost and can lead to very serious organizational problems.

The most common team function that people see are the type like those actively operating in the manufacturing (or production) and service sectors.

Examples of this type are assembly line teams responsible for a component, software support teams, aircraft maintenance, security teams, or even building maintenance.

Most of the work for these teams is routine or prescribed by a regular flow of activities or tasks. Because of the nature of the work, almost all are full-time workers.

It may not be strange to find out that most of the members of this type of team have worked together for many years.

Since the profile of the work does not change drastically, this form of team function allows team members to manage and to organize their own work.

Another team function is the kind that is entirely task-focused.

This type of function requires that every member has a specific skill that contributes to the successful completion of the task.

The specific role or task defines the composition of the team based on the skills or knowledge that will be brought in by that prospective member.

The level of experience of each member in a particular field of specialization allows the team to modify solutions or improvise methods to get the job done even in the most extreme situations.

As a member of management or as a team manager responsible for the team with this kind of function, you will have to prescribe the mission or the specific task.

Once the team has been presented with their mission or task, they take over.

Team functions that are project or development driven also require specialized knowledge or skills but the project takes longer to complete.

Members of the team may sometimes come together just to complete a single task or sub-project and later go back to their regular work.

Teams with this function tend to work with a high level of autonomy in the organization within the duration of the project.

Another team function that through the years have influenced the corporate world are those providing advice or assume a certain level of decision-making in the organization.

Management teams that are common in the service or hotel industry are good example of this team function. Highly specialized roles of investment or financial consulting teams are also examples of this function.

Not all functions require high-level participation. Quality control circles in many manufacturing organizations prescribe this function in their teams.

Members of the team with this function perform other roles in the organization and will normally use a very small portion of their working time.

The level of autonomy in this type of function is not very high and highly dependent on the degree of commitment that management has demonstrated to support the team approach in their organizational development.

The function of the team will greatly be influenced by how very detailed or specific is the objective or how generalist or broad are the goals.

Team Structure

If the processes that define the functions are very distinct you will have to find out if it will require a single person to accomplish or a single person with multiple roles and skills.

You will have to know if:

the process are happening simultaneously or executed in parallel work schedule;

the tasks or jobs are co-located or have to be performed in the same location or site;

the knowledge and skill set required to perform a job or complete a task can logically be expected from the same person or is it too highly specialized and unrelated to or not complementary to each other.

With the above knowledge, the team can map out the best approach to accomplish their goals or keep up with their vision.

Never assume that team members understand the structure the first time you discuss it with them.

Experienced have taught me to explain structure with a chart and a print out of the brief description of the roles represented by the neat boxes in the chart.

There's very little ambiguity with chart and those with different perception of their roles will be able to ask the relevant questions when they read a brief description of their roles in hard copy.

Training Your Team

Training a customer service team is different from training an individual to equip him with competence.

The kind of training that a customer service team undergoes is not the kind that makes them more competent.

Usually a well selected team leader and members are more than competent taken individually.

The training that teams go through are designed more to make the team work or function together.

It is really a training that forces or coach team members to use knowledge and skills in complementary proportions so as to attain the synergy needed to successfully complete a project.

The experience undergone during training helps meld the team into a seamless working unit more capable than each member undertaking tasks individually.

Team Empowerment

You now have selected your team leader and members with a high degree of confidence that they will be competent enough to contribute to the team.

Training will also ensure that the team functions well together.

The team has a clear mandate, a structure, and a process developed by the team itself.

Your team manager and team leader are able to work harmoniously to get the right resources in the hands of the team at the right moment.

Even with all of the above the team still needs to take responsibility for their work. This is only possible if management delegates a vital process that will allow the team to complete their mandate.

Most organizations however are still toddlers when it comes to delegation. They do come up with some forms of delegation but with a twist.

They come up with a checklist and a detailed procedure how the task will be done.

The team or work group has little legroom to innovate or to be creative when the situation requires.

What is missing is "empowerment"!

The team must be able to not only take responsibility for doing the relevant work to accomplish its mandate.

It must also be able to make the necessary or relevant decisions to carry out the work effectively. This is the core of real empowerment.

Empowerment has more to do with the culture of the organization and philosophy of management.

Unless the organizational culture allows real delegation and a truly honest belief that well-motivated teams can make the right decisions and act on those decisions, empowerment will not be possible.

I believe that it is simply difficult or impossible to make teamwork possible without real empowerment.

Only empowered teams can make significant gains in organizations.

People who do the actual work must have the power to make decisions about matters that gets the job done.

Are you comfortable with team empowerment?

Teamwork

Our common visualization of the concept of teamwork is a team being able to work together to accomplish a goal.

Teamwork is a concept more delicate and less simplistic than that.

The heart of teamwork is delegation and empowerment.

Teamwork is getting teams to take responsibility for their tasks and jobs to complete their mandate without always consulting or running to top management.

You must give your team the authority to make specific day-to-day decisions related to operations or projects.

This can be quite a difficult proposition for managers who are control freaks.

Traditional managers have a different concept of management control. This concept can be in direct conflict with their understanding of delegation.

For some, delegation can be perceived as a threat to job security. Empowerment is a higher form of delegation.

Imagine how threatening empowerment can be to these traditional managers.

I believe that people who are responsible and are treated as responsible individuals will simply act their part and behave responsibly.

My experience working with students, old people, farmers, fishermen, gold miners, security forces, and even ex-convicts have made me realized that our ability to communicate our respect for people have consistently proven my belief.

Remember that not one aspect of team building will help you create an effective team. Teamwork is really just one of many.

If you want teamwork to happen I suggest not doing the following:

Making assumptions that members in the "team" are actually eager to work and that they are equipped with the necessary skills to work within the team.

Extending or imposing too much authority or too little of it.

Disregarding existing organizational structures to accommodate the creation of teams.

Providing inadequate organizational support.

Management referring to an operational or performing unit as a team when actually they are managing the unit as a set of individuals.

Overall the success of teams will depend largely on three major factors: Commitment, Accountability, and Opportunity.

This is the last of the Customer Service dimensions. I do hope you learn something from it. Do ask me questions? Post it here of course!

Log on next time because I'll share with you some of the things I believe are facts of life in Customer Service.

Source: "The Six Dimensions of Customer Service". VY Paralisan. Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.

Dimension Five: The Business Plan

2005-08-05T11:17:00.001+08:00

When I facilitate business planning workshops, I am amazed by how much marketing or business development people don't know about their customers.

Worse is that you don't come across good documentation of customer profile.

Most of the customer profiles I come across describe their customers in so vague and generic terms they might as well describe a horse or any specimen of mammals considered our direct evolutionary cousins.

The really successful marketing organizations see customer information as a strategic tool, accumulate it like it was oil and guard it like it was gold.

You may say that nobody can possibly have that much information about a customer.

If you're saying that then you're one of the many who don't keep information about your customer.

Customer Data is the Key to Intimately Know Your Customer

You may not know it but you probably are accumulating a considerable amount of data about your customers.

Most business or organizations keep data about customers, suppliers or even competitors.

You can say you almost do this at a fairly regular rate.

You just do so without conscious or deliberate effort to use this data to your advantage.

What most businesses don't realize is that there is really a profile hidden in the cluttered paperwork that most sales and accounting people keep.

It's practically staring back at them like a large puzzle waiting to be piece together.

Most of the information we get about customers is either an effort to look back or to understand what is about to come to either correct an oversight or avoid past mistakes.

Unfortunately, the objective of most business planning is like that, correct an oversight or avoid past mistakes.

It's going to be a long way before small business will take business planning or identifying customers as a proactive strategy rather than a remedial reaction to competition or the environment.

The typical questions you should be able answer with your existing business information are as follows:

How much profit contribution value do you attribute to each customer in a year or a lifetime based on historical revenue and profit margin contribution?

Make a list of your customer constituting 80% of your revenue and net profits. Rank them according to net profitability.

Do you have a compelling reason why you should retain the account that is the most expensive to serve?

If you don't have the numbers from last year in a spreadsheet, you are going to need a crystal ball guessing the baseline projection.

There is really no empirical basis for you to guess what will be the starting point of the forecast.

You must be able to at least approximate the money value of each account from last year.

These are concerns better discussed during a business planning workshop or conference.

I know what you're thinking.

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT)

You're thinking that you are already doing SWOT every year. SWOT actually refers to Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

I don't know if you notice this yet, SWOT is not "the" business plan.

So much of the inputs in SWOT analysis are really collection of perceptions from stakeholders.

The end result of the SWOT exercise is made even more confusing because sometimes facilitators with not enough business sense mistake the exercise of SWOT analysis as the planning itself.

This is the reason why stakeholders, after all the cost and time spent doing SWOT analysis, come to realize that they have not moved forward to a new milestone in their planning process.

SWOT is what I refer to in my business planning workshop as the Pre-planning Information Gathering Phase.

Your customer profile is just one of many categories of information you should be getting during SWOT analysis.

This means that if you have completed your SWOT and proceeded immediately to business planning without a clear customer profile, you just undertook an expensive exercise in stupidity.

I am shocked that organizations used to doing SWOT come to the workshops bringing nothing.

In my workshops, I give each of the stakeholders who will be attending the SWOT analysis a diagnostic questionnaire and a checklist of data or information they should take with them during the SWOT sessions.

Without these data or hard facts, the whole SWOT session will be merely a gathering of perceptions.

I maybe moving too far from the subject but the bottom line is if you have a gathering of perceptions without the facts to validate them, your people's perception is really just that--perception.

When you do business planning, hard facts speak definitely and distinctly louder than perceptions.

You can act on facts better than you can on perceptions.

The only perception relevant to the planning process is your customers' perception of you and your offering.

Critical Aspect of Business Planning

The major aspects of business that must be factored in during a business planning workshop are as follows:
Goal Definition

Some organizations have very simple goals: separate the customer from his money and use every resource to make the money go their way.

Majority who don't really know who are their customers or why these customers even buy anything from them seem to have a simpler goal: Grab it and go!

For a very few they believe that serving the customer first is their goal.

These very few believe that somehow money will go to them more predictably this way.

The more experienced and savvy define their goal based on a certain customer base and revenue.

They set it this way because they believe that certain volume of satisfied customers have an equivalent potential in terms of present and future revenue.

Goals can be purely financial, partly altruistic but definitely formulated to reach a certain completion within a time frame.

Strategy

The general approach of organizations or enterprises to achieving goals is its strategy.

Strategy is a simple statement that defines what has to be done and how it is going to be done.

It is simple enough to provide everyone a direction and general enough to accommodate several tactical or operational maneuvers in the medium and long-term to achieve goals.

Structure

It is surprising that very few realize that structure follows strategy.

Usually, when you start an organization, you start with the structure and then work down on the functions of the people who will be in the structure.

We do this even before we know what exactly the different units in the structure will do in relation to business goals.

Organization is the creation of the necessary structure and processes to support your strategy.

Policy

A broad sets of guidelines for action or basis for decision. In strict corporate sense, it is the guidelines set by or approved by the board.

Policies maybe prepared by one person or by a group, but it will have to pass the scrutiny and nod of another level of authority in a corporation.

Usually this authority rests on the board of directors.

When somebody refers to an issue as a policy issue, it normally means it is a matter better left for the board of directors.

Procedure

Procedures are specific steps to complete a task or a routine. This brings the detailed and actionable reflection of policy at the operational level.

If your procedures are on paper that will normally constitute what you will refer to as SOP or standard operating procedure.

If it is in one compiled document, you can refer to it as your operating manual.

Financial Controls

The concept of financial management to most accounting department heads is not to allocate anything to anyone as much as possible.

In most small business, the accounting department will most likely be managed by a relative or even a wife.

This is typical of business without a plan.

Without a good business plan, cost management is really just cutting corners or not spending at all.

You must view cost management as a strategic tool.

The budget is the foundation of your financial controls.

Take time to study carefully what goes into the budget.

Getting the different business units involved will help a lot in preparing a realistic and sound budget.

You define goals and then formulate the structure that best enable you to harness resources to accomplish the goal.

You identify the resources you need and you pay for these resources with the confidence that each resource yields a certain level of profitability or helps you reach a certain milestone in your plan.

Get educated in financial management in general and financial controls in particular.

What you must decide on your own is to define what constitute investment and operating costs.

Business Alliances/Commitments

Alliances provide advantages not possible if you are doing it on your own. Some resources like experience, technology, goodwill and a host of others takes some years to build.

Business alliances make for acquiring these resources in the shortest possible time.

An organization must however know their organization well in order to be convincing to a prospective business partner what relevant advantage he is bringing to the table.

Advantages of selective or strategic alliances:

Access to technology or patents

Infusion of knowledge and skills

Adoption of better management approach and systems

Goodwill

Access to new or wider market

Access to better products or services

Adoption of cost-effective marketing strategy or system

Better service standards

You can probably add to this list with your own unique experiences based on cooperative ventures you have created in the course of your own growth.

Your business plan must take into consideration the advantages and limitations of your existing business alliances.

Small enterprises may not have the cash-flow to hire professionals to help them conduct business planning.

Most of the materials for business planning workshops have copyrights and consultants charge certain fees for the use of these materials.

You can download my "Consultant's Resource Kit" for your business planning workshop. It's free and it's available in portable digital format (Acrobat PDF).

Source: "The Six Dimensions of Customer Service". VY Paralisan. Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.

Dimension Four: The Tools

2005-08-05T11:00:00.001+08:00

Implementing customer service programs require resources or tools.

Tools are specific applicable arsenal at your disposal to act and to achieve results.

The modern age equips you with so many tools depending on the seriousness or commitment your organization has to customer service.

Tools must have a specific purpose and application.

Since the use of tools may mean investment or cost, it must be use effectively and for the right reasons.

Purpose of Tools

The concept of tools is as unique as the people or organization using these tools.

What can be a simple checklist to one can be a quality control tool to another?

Customer service does need tools. Tools are use for the following varied purposes.

Here are some of the most significant ones:

aid in implementing and documenting feedback mechanism

help manage business and know how the business is going

maintain the integrity of the process

maintain the quality of service delivery

help deliver and confirm delivery of service

aid in managing and developing the service team

make customer interaction less stressful for both service people and customer

secure and validate information and transactions

communicate to customers, to partners, to shareholders, company officers, and even the general public

If you are not yet sure if you are actually acquainted with the tools I'm talking about, here's a short list of some of them.

Communication Tools

Phone

Internet/Website

Mobile phones

Postal Mail

Advertising

PABX

Product/Service Delivery Tools

Technical Tools

Service Vehicles

Website

Postal Mail

Monitoring/Feedback Forms

Service Checklist

Administrative/Management Tools

Business Plan

Budget

Financial Statements

Manual of Procedures

Manual of Operations

Standard Operating Procedures

Service Agreement

HRD/Training Development Tools

Job Description

Skills/Knowledge Inventory

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Training Needs Analysis Questionnaire

Recruitment and Selection Manual

Customer Relations Tools

CRM Software

Customer Database

Process Flow Charts

Monitoring/Feedback Forms

Incident Reports

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Although, there is almost unlimited sources of tools in the market the choice really will be based on your own realities and what you define is the most cost-effective for you.

There's a catch! You need to learn how to use them!

The Most Widely Used Low-Cost Tools Today!

Let us take the most effective and the most applicable to most small enterprises.

Survey Forms

If you do a poll of outlets in a mall, more than half of outlets don't have a survey form to deliberately capture data or information about their walk-in customers.

With printing and printers getting cheaper, businesses still don't take data mining seriously.

After all that hype through the years of customers being important, few businesses actually have the willingness or common sense to classify customer data in the same category as their account receivables.

The really strange thing in marketing is that the most successful businesses seem to be the ones with the system, tools, people, culture and attitude to make customer profiling work for them.

Survey forms don't have to be long.

A survey form half the size of an A4 paper can get enough information if you know exactly what you want the data for.

Customer Data/Info Capture forms/Databases

Will you recognize a database if you saw one?

Chances are if your accounting section or accountant is using a spreadsheet, you will probably have a set of database somewhere in your PC.

Your sales summary in Microsoft Excel is a database.

Your mailing list is a database.

Your accounts receivable if organized in a spreadsheet is a database.

The key is to understand the logic behind the way the data in the database is organized.

I can go on and on about how database can be use for a lot of things but that will mean writing a whole section altogether.

I'm writing a separate e-book on using database in support of customer service. You can check that out.

You'll get a preview of that e-book from my website. Chances are I'll package it in portable digital format or PDF. The good news is the first edition will be free!

So keep logging on or simply subscribe to my newsletter.

Standard Business Forms (sales, accounting, service)

Let's run through several most common bunches of paperwork you take for granted that says so much about your customers.

Let's take your garden variety delivery receipt.

What do you normally get from your delivery receipt?

Most of the delivery receipts are actually standard forms created by your printer rather than by your people.

This means the data you get from them are mostly very common.

A typical delivery receipt form allows you to get the following data: delivery receipt serial number, date of delivery, name of customer (probably with address and contact information), description of whatever is being delivered (it might include details about warranty), value of the goods, payment or sales document reference, name of person or office suppose to receive the item described, person preparing the form and the person who actually delivered the items.

Now let's take your common official receipt.

Your common official receipt has the following data: official receipt serial number, date of transaction, mode of payment, name of paying customer (You sometimes don't bother getting contact information anymore and worst is you only get a big letter "C".), amount actually paid, description of item bought, name of person receiving the amount and maybe some notes about order slip or warranty.

How could very common forms like these generate a profile of customers?

The forms themselves will not reveal anything yet.

The data in those forms however will reveal a lot about the specific transaction in the form and eventually about the customers involved in the transaction.

The data themselves will not be of any use unless organized in a structured form.

This data in structured form is what we normally refer to as a database.

Office Productivity Software

In my eleven years working and talking about technology, I still see and witness the most incredible applications of information technology.

My amazement is not on the new things that are being introduced in the market but by boundless possibilities users find in the technology.

Take for example our common, garden variety Microsoft Word.

If you ask the more experience user why they want the new version, they would say along the lines of: "It's got five thousand more features than the last version."

If you ask exactly what features they are referring, they would say along the lines of: "I'm not sure. I have not tried any of it yet!"

My affair with Microsoft Word is around the lines of no more than five hundred features in the last five years and probably less than that for Microsoft Excel.

This number is less than five percent of the features you will see described in a manual.

With that number alone, I had created and managed sales campaign, mail campaign, fax campaign, product launching and more than five thousand templates of letters responding to complaint from Customers.

Believe me, I did not get this through training, but through sheer nerve-wracking necessity and continuous crisis management of marketing campaigns for the last five years or more.

A cursory exploration in Microsoft Excel would have indicated that listing names and addresses would be simpler in spreadsheets than in word-processors.

Not only that, you can actually have a cost-efficient scheduling and mail delivery system if you organize by district, city, block or street the list created by your assistant.

You'll have a good mailing list to boot for the courier service to use to have recipients sign actual receipt of the mail.

Somehow I have managed to accomplish the following using simple office productivity software:

Organize information about Customers.

Plan and implement effective marketing or sales campaign.

Design inexpensive advertising copy for products.

Analyze revenue, net profit and costs to help start a business plan.

Use simple software to manage time and projects.

Establish simple credit and collection schedule.

You will most likely have a PC in your office or at home.

The least you can do for your business is learn how to use it creatively and to the hilt!

Email/Autoresponders

E-mail marketing is one of the most effective business tools in the Internet today.

Although the leverage you get from this marketing tool is great, it is currently deluge by the notoriety of Spammers.

Autoresponders are simply automated systems that send email messages triggered by you or by someone sending an email message to your autoresponder account.

It is an automatic follow-up system you can use to respond to someone requesting information through a form in your web site.

Autoresponders can be programmed to send instant or preset messages at specific timed intervals.

You can send your messages any time 24 x 7 to anyone emailing to your autoresponder account.

I have used autoresponders for several applications.

Currently, I'm using autoresponders for:

Online seminars and trainings via email to prospects who register via a form in my website.

Answering frequently asked questions about services.
Confirming schedule via email of job applicant's interview for the week.
Building Opt-in List of prospects for our live seminars.
Building Opt-in List for a newsletter.

Some applications I have come across are the following:

Reinforcement Programs

Normally use to motivate sales staff, affiliates and new Customers.

PreSelling or UpSelling

When you have products or services allied or complementing those previously sold to Customers, you can use autoresponders to follow up on Customers and offer these products or services.

Bulletins and Updates

Whether they are prospects, Customers, sales people, tech support or affiliates, you need to be in constant contact.

You have to do this on autopilot so you can do something else like improving products or services or creating new ones.

Advertisement Tracking

To be able to know where your traffic is coming from or from which ad and web site they are getting information, you need a system that captures information from visitors.

You can always use autoresponders to capture membership or subscription via a registration form in your website.

If you think email is a strategic tool for you, you can take extra time to sign-up for free lessons on using autoresponders.

These lessons will come to you via your email.

Website

The Internet when it started did not have the color and dazzle of most web sites we see today. It was just plain text. It was plain and often times cryptic messages on a great black screen. The only reason people got or logged into the Internet was to grab or receive information.

It is not color, picture or sound that people pay access to the Internet. It is information.

Even the most bland or plain looking website will be inundated with so much traffic if it offers the most needed or critical information.

Information is the real commodity in the Internet nothing else.

The effectiveness of your web site can be measured. How?

The most obvious is the traffic count.

The next is the number of downloads.

Then by the number of emails you receive because of the site or your subscription service.

The number of orders actually credited to the web address.

Not all of the above tools will apply to you. You will have to do a bit of experimentation using some of these tools.

You must come up with a way to measure the effectiveness of each. Don't rely on opinion too much.

The reasons I got proficient with any of the above tools was that situations have forced me to learn to use them and eventually rely on them in some phase or aspect of my job.

Once you get good results in any of these tools, you will never go back to doing things the old way.

Trust me. The cost savings and the opportunities that will open up to you using new and better tools are really worth the effort and time learning them.

I have a website providing downloadable e-books about some of the above-mentioned tools.

Source: "The Six Dimensions of Customer Service". VY Paralisan. Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.

Dimension Three: The Service Process

2005-08-05T10:33:00.000+08:00

Knowing and Improving Your Business Process

We normally just do it without being conscious how it's done.

The reason: You have always done it that way.

There's always a form somewhere that tells you someone is receiving something in some point in time or at some point in the process.

You will most likely know what was not done rather than what was done exactly because something does not arrive in some point in time or at some point in the process.

To pass on this process to someone, you will most likely do a show-and-tell routine. This usually happens when somebody doing this process for you leaves.

Your Show-And-Tell routine:

You show the new guy the general way of doing your stuff and describe it in broad terms and then show him how it's done.

This is an approach where your new guy will come to you hours after with a bundle of forms (to ask you how he's going to fill it up).

After that he is going to ask in what part of some procedure (which you also forgot to tell him) he is going to use the forms.

You tell the guy the process and the forms he is going to fill up in some part of the process.

This is an approach where you use a full day telling him about the voluminous forms he is going to fill up in each part of the stuff you do.

I did a study of a merchandising store several years back. The store had 44 different forms just to track inventory from delivery to store display.

After going through half of your forms, you really won't have time to show him anything else.

You tell the guy how you do your stuff in general terms then proceed to give a blow-by-blow description of the step in each part. Because of the gory details and the far-away look of your new guy, you drop the show-the-forms routine altogether.

You're so dedicated in indoctrinating your new guy of your management style, you show him everything.

You describe the stuff you do, you give him all the colorful details, with specific instruction how to use forms in each step and actually watch him do it himself.

This usually takes weeks and months to finish.

Half way to your indoctrination program, your accountant calls because of late income tax return, you have upcoming deliveries pending, and a customer complaining about warranties.

All these usually happen when you least expect the tax man to walk through your door.

You get your new guy to ask the questions because he is going to ask it in the point of view of the dumb or the ignorant.

He is going to ask a lot of questions. He will probably be asking the right ones too.

Don't believe about all that crap on security and confidentiality.

If you are not paying your employee more than half of what you are earning, that employee will be your worst threat to security and confidentiality when he leaves.

If he leaves because he hates you, and your competitor gets hold of your guy, your competitor is going to pay him well to beat you at your own game.

If your guy left because he is smarter than you, you can bet your mother's wedding ring that he is being paid more than half what you are earning.

What have we done so far?

We defined the profile of your customer (Dimension One: The Customer).

You have identified what bugs your customer and have realized the benefits for your customer when his problem is solved and more.

You have come up with a way to remove what is bugging your customer by creating a service. You even have a name for this service.

You have a general idea how to deliver your service or at least able to describe it(Dimension Two: The Service Concept).

Now we are going to tie all of these together. We are now going to build a system or structure to make things happen in your business and deliver the product or service you are selling.

We are now going to build your customer service piece by piece.

Building Your Customer Service Process

The critical component that makes a service great is the process. You must have good picture of how your process works.

In fact, you literally must have some form of picture or diagram of your process.

You must be able to manage the process so you can deliver results. To ensure the integrity and quality of the process, you must be able to have some form of documentation.

Through documentation you can institutionalize the process and preserve the quality of whatever you deliver.

Make sure you can maintain and protect the integrity of the process and its anticipated results by devising a mechanism for feedback in each stage of the process.

Process Flow

Process flow is the general description of how one part of the service starts and where it terminates.

Usually it is better represented in a diagram called a process flow chart.

The major parts or chunks of the service are described in boxes connected by a solid line connecting each of the boxes in a logical and sequential flow.

Very easy to state above how it is but putting it on paper is really another thing. When I let the client's staff document their process, they really have no idea what I'm talking about.

You must be able to distinguish between key business process and procedure.

A process is better represented by boxes and lines while a procedure is really a set of specific steps to get a task done.

What you will see really in a procedure is a title, a short description of what is this procedure (usually includes what is the expected result) and the specific steps for example: Steps 1 to 7 how to start up a machine.

If you have to do this yourself, don't be surprise if your people give you a procedure instead of a process.

9 out of 10 supervisors in different department from different organizations will not be able to diagram their process clearly.

It's fairly easy to see this.

Simply ask them to diagram the start and the end of the process in their department or team and include the feedback mechanism.

Usually, you don't have to look at the whole process anymore.

Give your most senior operations staff this homework to be submitted the next working day.

Go ahead and try.

When I was doing it for the company I worked for I don't know if I should laugh or cry when I saw their homework, but that was along time ago.

Management of Process and Results

Most organizations have layers of processes and procedures without really appreciating the purpose or objective of these processes or procedures.

A process must have an objective or purpose. Without any objective or purpose, a process is literally a practice of futility.

It is a formal way of going through the motions.

You must be able to define what the process is supposed to accomplish or to achieve.

Once you know what your process is suppose to accomplish, you must now determine what resources will be needed to make the process work and who should be doing what to complete the different components of the process.

You must synchronize all the tasks and coordinate the people involved to ensure the process works smoothly.

You must be able to establish accountability for the integrity of the process.

Controls must be established to protect the integrity of the process.

You must find a way or institute mechanisms to inform you what is happening at every critical point of the process.

It is also important that you already have the necessary procedure to act when things don't go the way you plan or expect.

Designate someone to be accountable for the integrity of the process and another for the desired results.

If you are a frontline staff, you will most definitely be accountable for results.

It is the first line supervisor, team leader or immediate superior who will be given the responsibility of ensuring that you follow procedures, keep within standards, and get the resources you need at the right amount and moment to get your job done to achieve the objective.

Documentation of Process

The most significant piece of documentation you should keep is the process flow of your key business processes followed by the process flow chart of your customer service program.

In the process flow chart shall be the key positions responsible for the integrity of the process and key positions or teams responsible for results.

Your documentation of the process flow chart should include where the process begins and where it terminates.

Anyone reading the process flow chart must be able to discern if a document (a report or completed form) is needed to start or complete a key component of the process or if the component will generate another document.

The duration in man-hours or man-days should also be reflected to provide information regarding the time required to complete each key component of the process.

Documentation of Results

To be able to document results you must know before hand what results to expect and what exactly to document.

When you are documenting a customer service event, you are confirming two (2) sets of events: the completion of a process; and the delivery of customer benefits (product/service).

The documentation of the completion of a process enables the customer service manager or leader to monitor

the beginning and termination of an event

the proper execution of a process

The documentation of the delivery of customer benefits enables:

the leader to know if delivery has been completed

the customer service staff to confirm or validate acceptance of delivery by customer and the customer's level of satisfaction

the customer to know and validate that a service has been rendered or a product has been delivered and that the customer service personnel has conducted the delivery in a manner acceptable to the customer

In most service providers, the official receipt and delivery receipt are enough documentation.

The best service organization however institutes a separate documentation process after the completion of delivery.

A telemarketer or account manager can have a delivery and satisfaction checklist and calls the customer to validate if indeed delivery was conducted in a manner compliant with internal service standards and according to the customer's satisfaction.

The level or degree of detail is really dependent on the commitment of the organization or service unit to customer service standards.

Feedback Loop

The essential part of managing the customer service process is to get feedback. You must know if every component of the process work and if the results are actually achieved.

You must integrate a feedback mechanism into the process.

The feedback mechanism must do a lot of things for you. It must help you:

Confirm and validate delivery of product or service (achievement of objective)

Measure your cost of delivery or management of process

Gauge the ability and capability of the process and human resource to deliver product or service (delivery of benefits)

Open a channel of communication with your customer about the content and process of delivery of the product or service

Collect data to improve the content of the product or service or the process of delivery

Determine the state of your relationship with your customer

Assess the conduct of your human resource in the presence of customers

Feedback mechanisms can come in the form of a report, a completed form, a message (an email or fax), a mechanical trigger like a door opening or an item physically brought in.

It could be anything that will trigger an action or a response from either your customer service team or your customer.

It must be able to capture information about the quality of your service delivery or the end result of such delivery.

The content of your feedback must be actionable or it must have relevance to your ability to respond to the customer or improve your ability to respond.

The bottom line is: What will you do with what you know?

The next post might be something you would want to read through more thoroughly. It touches on specific tools I used to make my work easier in managing Customer Service programs.

Dimension Two: The Service Concept

2005-08-05T10:07:00.001+08:00

Nothing can be more frustrating and painful to a product manager than the prospects of seeing one's product or service at the crossroads of its slow down or demise.

In this case, you should have already taken note of indicators that you are approaching this crossroad.

Ufortunately for start-ups, they do not have the tools or the experience to anticipate this.

A Concept in Constant Evolution

A product or service is always in a constant state of evolution simply because the users of these products or services have needs that change constantly.

If you have a product or service concept that was designed with real customers(as against a perceived one) in mind, the evolution of this product or service will be seen.

A good product or service manager will be able to see it evolving from one stage to another or from one life cycle to the next.

If you got your eye fixed on the target, your customer, you will see their needs changing.

Consequently, you respond to these changes by either adding features to your product or service, or changing the product or service entirely.

If you started your customer service program around an offering with no clear product or service concept, you will find yourself in a perpetual state of tweaking your customer service programs without really knowing why some features work and why some don't.

You are the proverbial blind man concluding an elephant is hairy because you're holding its tail.

Now, how do you get your product or service concept right the first time?

You go back to knowing your Customer!

If you think you're doing fine with the way you're managing your customer service, you don't really have to do this.

Good luck!

Haven't you notice it's easier to compete when most of the enterprises in the community are doing their customer service wrong.

You win by just doing nothing.

Get Your Service Concept Right the First Time

Prior to creating the concept, you must have a very clear idea of what you are trying to do to your perceive customer.

Are you solving a really nagging problem?

Are you removing their "pain" so they can go on doing what they must be doing?

Are you helping them gain more profit or cutting down cost?

Do you know exactly how to solve a problem or remove the pain?

Can you see the process or procedure in your head as it happens?

Can you draw a rough diagram or flow chart of how the process is actually happening?

If you take the product or service apart, can you see how each part functions or leads to another procedure or process?

If you can clearly put the answers to these questions and resolve most of these issues, you now have the raw material to creating your service concept.

The Dimensions of A Service (or Product) Concept

The service concept can be created by effectively getting the right combination
of the following:

Features

Features are descriptions or words we use to describe the nice things we see about our products or service we perceive is relevant to the customer or provide triggers in the mind of the customer of what is relevant.

A technical description of a product can be its set of features. Completion dates, duration of service, ancillary products delivered with the service can be the service features.

Benefits

"Benefits" is the generic word we use to refer to the solution our service delivers or the things that ease the customer's "pain".

The benefits must specify exactly what pain is removed, how much cost is lessened or how much profit is gained.

If you are offering computer maintenance for example, the benefit of maintenance coverage is less downtime, no unexpected service fees, better management of maintenance cost, assurance of spare parts for the machines covered and full documentation of asset history and status.

All these benefits are not perceived by the same types of customers.

Users benefit by less downtime and assurance of spare parts.

Your customer's finance department will value the more stable service fees and better management of maintenance cost. Top management will be able to monitor computer assets for purposes of planning and deployment.

Deliverables

Deliverables are items related or part of the product or service that must physically be handed over to the customer.

It is important that deliverable items be use to mark the beginning and end of the delivery of a product or service.

Deliverables may come in the form of an official receipt, delivery receipt, warranty form, a gift, a coupon, or a report.

Your customer must see a tangible item delivered to signify the beginning and end of a service whether that service is paid or for free.

Components

Components are functional parts of a product or service. In a product this could be very easy to see. It will be quite different looking at a service.

In a service, your customer must see you actually doing something for them.

For example, when designing a maintenance service you can probably break the
components of the service into diagnostics, preventive, and remedial service under a brand called Premium Service or Platinum Service.

Product or Service Brand

Your product or service brand is the official or formal name under which you will sell or market your product or service.

Today we generally refer to this as your product or service brand.

You must choose a name that will make your customer remember the product or service and tie that product or service name to you.

You can gain good leverage if the brand name you choose creates a picture in the mind of your customer of the benefits gain from your offering.

Your service concept is a creative combination of all of the above.

Your customer must be able to picture the value of service or product as it is being used.

The key is that there must be a picture or visualization of the features, components, deliverables working together to deliver the perceive benefits from using or consuming the product or service.

Get your service concept in writing. This is the only way to find out if everybody sees the same thing.

If you or your service team can't seem to agree on the service concept, how can you expect a total stranger like your customer to get a hint of what you're offering is all about.

Here's a hint if you got your service concept right.

Building Your Service Concept

Get your service or product people to work with your marketing or sales guys to come up with a product or service flyer or pamphlet.

Your service or product guys can probably define the components and features.

Your marketing or sales guys must be able to understand and visualize these features and components in their head.

Both of your product (or service) and marketing (or sales) people must agree on what exactly are the deliverables. These deliverables will constitute the company's "contract" with prospective customers.

Deliverables will definitely end up in the terms and conditions of your service agreement (or contract).

The next step will be to come up with the right choice of text and editorial style to convert these features and components into benefits.

Remember the section "The Customer" where the question "What does your customer need?" was raised to get to know your customer?

The benefits should directly meet the customer need!

If all your people seem to agree with what they're doing so far, then you have just nailed down your service or product concept.

Once you roll out a service or product, you need to keep tract of how the benefits are delivered or which of your products or services are performing well.

You also need to remind your customer what product or services are delivering the benefits they paid for.

You need a name to go with the product or service and tie this name with the benefits enjoyed by the customer.

You need to create a service or product brand.

This name is what you will commonly see prominently printed on brochures, handbills, flyers, streamers and pamphlets.

This is your brand.

I have helped develop service concepts for training, computer maintenance, climate control systems, retail, security services, and a number of product and service brands.

Unless customer service and marketing people truly appreciate what makes up a service concept, it will be very hard to weave and connect the many elements of customer service down to doable procedures or delivery systems.

The next post will be about your Service Process. Do log on again!

Source: "The Six Dimensions of Customer
Service". VY Paralisan. Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.

Dimension One: The Customer

2005-08-04T12:59:00.002+08:00

Who is Your Customer? Oh, yisshhh here we go again.

Don't give me that oh-yiiiissshhh-here-we-go-again, scratch-your-head, and look-at-the-heaven routine.

You should have been asking this question over and over again until you are convinced you truly know who is paying your salary, your rent, your benefits, and hey, your Christmas bonus.

What does your customer need?
What are the current products and services you have that meet this need?
How are you going to deliver these products and services to the customer?

I can bet you have no clear answer to these questions until now.

I would not even wonder if you are five or ten years in the business.

You would think that the question should no longer be an issue because most business should already know their customer before they should even start selling anything.

Unfortunately most businesses did not start by asking themselves who is their customer.

They started because they saw or have observed somebody making money doing something and they just ended up really following the other guy.

The issue of who is the customer only comes after they start realizing that money comes in a trickle or none at all.

They don't even ask: Who is the customer?

They simply ask why?

Understanding The Same Thing, Thinking The Same Way
Let the lead technical person in your company write his answer to these basic but relevant questions.

What does your customer need?

What is the current product and service you have that meet this need?

How are you going to deliver these products and services to the customer?

Do the same thing with your lead marketing guy.

Don't let them discuss. Just let them write it on a scratch paper.

Don't let them write more than seven points. No paragraphs just short key points.

If key words match, that is a positive thing.

If your two lead persons are the people who define the function, the process or work methodologies in their respective department, unit or team, you can conclude that they are in synch.

You can have a lot of perception and coordination problem if this is otherwise.

Then again this is just perception.

You will still need hard facts to validate if what you perceived is the condition that actually exists.

The hard facts you need lay underneath a lot of your data or databases.

You need to analyze what you have.

If your key people say that more than half of your customers are companies rather than home-based people, then your data should tell you that.

Is your data telling you that?

The data you take for granted can yield very surprising amount of ?truths? about your business.

Are you ready for the truth?

Or is it easier just ?winging it??

Oh you?re not winging it! So you?re doing SWOT - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats Analysis.

Hey that?s great!

You can read more about SWOT in the section ?The Business Plan? and if you have time, you might get a copy of a workshop tool I used for business planning.

Knowing Your Customer Needs

If somebody asks you if you want your car or air-conditioner maintained, you would most likely say no.

Most of the time, we don't find good justification to pay somebody to take care of our most precious assets. But, when your car or air-conditioner gives up on you on a bad day, you will surely pay up when the repairman gives you the bill.

Why?

Why do you think it is easier to pay up now?

Simple, you now have a problem.

This problem needs to be solved now not later.

Grudgingly you will pay up.

The lesson here is that if you have a solution to the problem and you are around or at least the person with a problem knows you're around, you get to send the customer the bill for your solution.

You get paid.

You get paid every time.

This lesson is telling you: You should know your customer's pain areas.

What bugs them?

What problems irritate them the most and how frequently?

What issues confront them at home or at work?

How much are they spending to get rid of the problem all the time or how much do they pay to get rid of the pain the problem is giving them?

You don't have to go far to get a feel of your customer. Ask yourself what bugs you? What gives you pain?

You must be able to recognize who is actually making the decision to use or to buy.

Know Who Will Benefit the Most

You must know who will actually benefit from what you are offering. This is the user.

You must anticipate that the person, office or organization making inquiries about your product or service may not eventually end up using your product or service.

Have you ever observe your customer using the product?

Do they actually use it the way it was designed to be use?

Are there other uses for the service or product that you have not actually seen?

Are there other benefits aside from what you anticipated the product or service should deliver?

Do the benefits actually derived are as perceived?

The thinking process or the decision process that follows is as unique as the ultimate users of your product or service.

Although you cannot change the product or service, you can however vary the way the product or service will be perceived.

The customer service program must accommodate these varied perceptions and decision-making process in its design.

The process therefore that supports your communication may not look at its ultimate customer the same way as your delivery process.

The communication process may be designed primarily to support technical evaluators and decision-makers but your delivery process may be designed to support the ultimate user of your product or service.

When I used to sell computer maintenance service, I have seen how the service is perceived by the different users.

Management sees maintenance as protection of asset, the department using the computers sees it as a support and leverage against downtime, and finance sees it as both cost and as a good source of information for determining how computer assets are actually use.

You can see that your perceive customer for the same service may not just be one category.

In my experience, even reports, if you package it well, can be a distinct service the aim of which is to satisfy the need of another set of customer inside an organization.

You can bill customers for more comprehensive reports aside from the usual incident reports that go with the statement of account.

This is assuming you have a good process for documenting results of specific service.

Know Where the Customer Is in His State of Need

Customers don't grow the same way and at the same rate.

These alone should tell you that even customers from the same category or industry will not necessary have identical requirements in their "need" evolution or maturity.

Customer Service programs must appreciate that customers grow.

Your programs must evolve with your customer.

The variation and growth of customer needs must also translate into varied services that specifically serve a customer in a phase or stage of its growth.

When I created a service concept for maintaining personal computers, I already anticipated that we need to support these PCs once they get linked physically through cables.

Not only did we anticipate the physical interconnectivity but we did see the coming of the nuances of managing these connected hardware resource through different network operating systems.

Why did we anticipate it? Did we suddenly saw the future of Microsoft of Novell? Did we see the network operating system coming to the market?

Actually, what we saw was more mundane. We saw the ease by which new users came to adapt desktop PCs into the workplace.

We knew something as good and as easy to use as desktops will become a necessity to ordinary office workers just as calculators were.

We simply saw desktops PCs growing in number in our head as business grew. We see more people getting hired to do more things.

I already saw that we were going to see different needs coming from this growth.

Eventually I had to study the difference between Microsoft Windows NT and Novell NetWare. I had to talk to our most experienced service team leaders in the Engineering Division.

We had to change the way we respond to customers contemplating on connecting their PCs.

I have to get my Marketing Assistants new sets of reference materials and develop most of them from scratch so they can respond to questions about the different networking technologies even those that were not yet commercially available.

I already drafted a new version of our maintenance agreement specifically tailored for the new networking technologies even though there were no inquiries yet about maintenance services for computer networks.

I firmly believed that we had to be ready for a new phase of growth in our customers IT needs.

It was a bit funny looking back at it because we were already creating a service concept for a need that even the customers have not anticipated nor signified they would look for.

The process and the forms I had put in place did help tremendously to capture the customer data I can use to anticipate the customer need that evolved.

Knowing Where Is Your Customer

You must be able to know where is your customer at certain times or frequency.
Do you find him in a mall, in a convention, in his home on a weekend?

Is he in tune to a certain TV or cable channel?

Where does he get his news?

Is it from early morning news (radio or TV) or is he subscribing to some form of periodical?

You must not only know where he is physically but where his mind is at a certain moment.

What is he thinking about on a Monday or midnight Saturday?

What occupies his mind during summer, Christmas or Halloween?

What is he most likely going to do or where he is going to be on a holiday?

In the customer's phase of growth (start-up, on-going or mature), do you offer services that benefits them while they are a start-up?

Is there another service if they start branching out? Or can you still serve them when they start opening up satellite offices in other cities?

Will you be able to serve them just as efficiently and as cost-effectively?

Is the size and quality of your human resource up to the challenge?

Is your cost accounting structure flexible to accommodate the creation of new forms of cost? Is your own expansion seen as cost or investment?

Are your training programs progressive enough to adapt to the changing and expanding responsibilities of your team?

Know Who Will Actually Pay

The most important thing is to discern who will actually pay--The decision-maker.

If you have to remember anything about knowing your customer this last thing should be it.

Most of the mistake sales people make when qualifying institutional prospects, is in not understanding the decision-making process of organizations.

You will not be able to pin down who will eventually sign the check if you do not understand the decision-making process of your customer's organization.

Your communication process for reporting action taken or easing up payment terms and writing your terms and conditions in a service agreement may be greatly affected by the perception and action of the person eventually paying for the service or product.

Getting Your Customer Profile Right

Do you have a list of your primary customers who contributed 80% of your gross revenue last year? (Remember the official receipts and the delivery receipts? This is the place to start.)
Can you tell which products or services did your primary customers buy or pay for? (See, you?re still going back to that delivery receipt and official receipts.)
How much of each of the products or services did they buy? (Need I say more?)
Do you know which of your customers were the most expensive to serve or the cheapest?
Can you rank your products and services according to net profit contribution?
Which of your customers were paying for the products or services providing the most net profit contribution?
Can you categorize your customer under a special group or groups based on the services delivered and mode of payment?
What is the demographic profile of the contact persons in your institutional customers?
Is there a common profile in terms of age, industry, sex, civil status, length of service in the company, rank, etc.?
Are certain groups of customers using certain products or services because of their industry, location, size, market share, market niche, profitability, etc.?
Do you have quantitative and qualitative description of your existing customer?

The issue whether forms or even databases can actually be tools for really knowing your customer is not as important as changing your way of thinking about proactive approaches to knowing customers.

The problem really is that most entrepreneurs either don?t care about customers or don?t really consider knowing customers as an important part of their day job.

You as an entrepreneur have to change the way you see your customer.

You have to change the way you take in or see things.

When you started as an entrepreneur, you were great at doing it.

Eventually, you will have to shift from being the Big Boss to being a manager with a system and a process. Then, you will have to be a visionary or a leader.

You must evolve.

But then again, you may need to satisfy your ego first. It may take a while before you get over that.

You may like being a superstar and just winging it!

Usually you?ll be saying something like: "I've last this long in this business, why would I need to change myself at this point in my success!"

I guess you?re an immortal and not too worried about getting old and dying like the rest of us.

You'll probably be around the next hundred years or so managing your business and not worried about where you're really going, who's taking over, and who's supervising who.

Yeah! Go right ahead. Don't change.

Even the biblical Moses took so long to make up his mind before realizing he was the One.

Eventually he did accept his fate to be The Leader who was going to lead the Jews out of Egypt and into the Promise Land.

God had to orchestrate a lot of difficult circumstances before Moses came to a right frame mind and took cognizance of what ought to be.

He single-handedly convinced the Jews that they need to look at a greater plan. His management style was not near any form of democracy we know now.

Even Moses had to accept that he has to change his management style.

I read Moses was more than 80 years old before God asked him to delegate to 10 capable men. With each of the ten selecting ten more down their own tribes or clans.

It was the first official act of delegation with a specific structure ever recorded on a document?The Bible

It may not be a coincidence that the oldest and most successful of the militaristic states and societies have subscribed to this formula of delegation.

Even God believed in changing structure and management style.

The Six Dimensions of Customer Service

2005-08-03T17:37:00.001+08:00

Do you really know what your customer service is for?

If you know what it is for, do you understand exactly what you should be doing to efficiently and cost-effectively deliver this to your customer?

Customer Service is a concept that is usually presented as a collection or patches of complementing activities done by an individual or a group of individuals.

It is seldom presented as a process or a system that an organization manages to seamlessly and effectively deliver solutions (product or service) to customers.

The conventional approach is to teach people to respond to customers using the telephone or handle a live person-to-person interaction specially when there is a dissatisfied or complaining customers.

The way I see it, you never have to resort to complaint management or scripted response to customers if you have done service delivery or created a truly satisfying product in the first place.

Most of the customer service programs are actually damage control or image protection ploys. I am also a customer for many services and most of these customer service programs are really just cheap scams or are downright shameful tactics to evade doing additional after-sales commitments.

You never have to handle complaints if you avoid hiring callous and stupid people. You never get callous and stupid people if you didn't promote a callous and stupid person to be a supervisor or department head who got this person in the first place. You never promote much less hire a callous and stupid person if you have a good recruitment policy.

Even if you did hire the right person, this person will not be able to function if you don't have a sensible service or product. They can't handle customers if you don't have good process to allow him to get his job right. Your support staff won't be able to do his job right because he can't understand his job description (if you have one).

What I'm telling you is that all the components and dimensions making up your customer service program are tightly connected to each other. You need to understand that you will not be able to build a customer service program by simply training people or coming up with process.

You need to tie all components or dimensions together. You must serve the right customer with the right product or service concept.

This concept must be supported by a seamless process and effective tools. This process must be managed and tools used by members of your staff having the right attitude and aptitude for the job.

You cannot maintain the right process, invest in the best tools or hire good people if you do not have a business plan that will make you viable.

You cannot have or make all of these dimensions happen or come at the right moment if you don't work as a team.

It took me more than five years to discern that most of the things I have done to build programs in support of customers seem to fall in a logical cluster of relationships and processes within the organization.
When I plan my approach to build a good customer service program, they all seem to fall almost always in six logical components or what I call as dimensions.

I like to refer to it as dimension because it seem easier to perceive it if it is not seen as a logical sequence of events or time specific evolution in an organization.

In my experience, you can literally deliver customer service in a box if you can build all these dimensions gradually and then tie them all together.

You can do it simultaneously or you may choose to work on one dimension at a time. It does not matter. What matters is that you must work on it with the intention of tying it together sometime, somehow.

All the things that you will do to build your customer service program will most likely be within the realm of the following dimensions: The Customer, The Service Concept, The Service Process, The Tools, The Business Plan and The Team.

My succeeding posts will all be excerpts from my e-book "The Six Dimensions of Customer Service" and all will walk you through how I build a customer service program.

Source: "The Six Dimensions of Customer Service". VY Paralisan. Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.

Indicators of Weak Customer Service Programs

2005-08-03T17:33:00.002+08:00

I don't know if people who buy service or expensive products do this but ever since I started getting evaluated for customer service quality, I began to compare everything I do in customer service to every store or shop that I patronize. I am very optimistic that those who are good at the basics of customer service will grow whether they like it or not.

Do you know why I truly believe this?

There so much bad service out there that doing the basic things like courtesy, listening, and actually doing something for customers will look exceeding exceptional in the eyes of a customer.

Let's take a look at a great number of indicators to open your eyes on things you should NOT or NEVER do!

The customer is often or usually talking to the owner, supervisor or general manager regarding issues of service delivery that are basic or mundane better delegated to rank-and-file.
Customers who call by phone will not get ready answers to inquiries nor get issues resolved within minutes or will not be referred to the "right" person who can resolve the issue or respond to the inquiry.
Service agreements or terms and conditions of delivery are filled with clauses of what the customer cannot have or what the customer will do that will void the agreement or violate the terms & conditions of the service. Some of the terms and conditions I've seen in computer maintenance are so full of things that can't be done, the sales people were finding it hard to explain exactly what they will deliver.
Written communications related to customer issues are evasive and are normally written in a legal or lawyer's editorial style or tone. You may have heard of service companies who take their customers to expensive lunch meetings because that's the only thing they can really do right and which they don't deliver themselves.
Service personnel are overly cautious when responding to issues related to terms and conditions of delivery and will be noncommital when communicating with customers regarding action to be taken.
Personnel responding to customer are curt and seem to exhibit arrogance when requested to clarify issues or when interacting with customers. There are even truly obnoxious and rude characters who are just being arrogant as a ploy to hide a plain old fashion rip off. These are genuine con artists who should be behind bars rather than behind the service counter.
Service personnel are not keeping records of tasks or are using forms (some don't even have them) that are either poorly designed, printed in so many copies or going through unnecessary layers of procedures which tend to frustrate customers rather than help them.
There simply is no system in place for the business to gather information or data about customers.
The service people seem to have the habit of passing you to different people or offices in the guise of "escalation" without explaining why.
The people are just downright or simply sloppy exhibited by dirty work area, poorly groomed service personnel, inappropriate uniforms, bad layout of service area, poor communication skills, and apparent lack of training even in the most elementary procedures of phone handling or management of customer complaints.
Poorly labeled or misleading labels on products or service.
The business is simply selling products or service with a branding strategy that smells like a scam or rip off more than anything else.
Exaggerated and use of worn out claims in advertisements. If it's too good to be true, it's really too good to be true.
It takes so long for a walked in customer to get prompt human contact or interaction from frontline staff. If you're standing in a reception area for five minutes without any staff acknowledging your presence, you're in there too long.

Had enough? You should!

I had enough of bad service a long time ago!

I'll take you down a road where you never have to be the bad guy in Customer Service. You might think that I have some secret or sophisticated technique behind all these customer service concept but honestly I don't.

What I have is experienced in the simple things in business and lots of common sense.

I want you read and read between the lines. The best Customer Service managers are very good at the basics. You will too.

Keep logging on!

Customer Service Tools: An Introduction

2005-08-01T11:35:00.001+08:00

I have worked for more than 14 years doing or managing Customer Service programs under multinational brands. My notes in these pages hopefully will enable me to share my experience with micro and small enterprises. My aim is to put them on equal footing as the most successful companies in as far as delivering their own versions of Customer Service.

As a consultant, I have talked with people with Customer Service programs the likes of which I have seen in the early 1990s. These are Customer Service programs that dwell only on frontline activities. Most of the enterprises then equate Customer Service to handling complaints, taking phone calls or routing request for warranty. No wonder so many enterprises create more enemies of Customers instead of keeping them. They have no idea what the whole concept is all about!

Customer Service in my perspective and my experience is more than that. It is a commitment of an organization to deliver the information and services that forms an integral part of your marketing mix. The whole organization is the delivery vehicle of Customer Service not just the frontline.

I wrote an e-book on Customer Service entitled "The Six Dimension of Customer Service" which I provide freely to those who would like to know more how successful Customer Service organizations do it.

For more than ten years, I have discern that the host and cluster of activities that deliver Customer Service falls in six related or cluster of activities. I will unbundle this dimensions for you in these pages.

Log on and learn!