The average business doesn't spend enough time or use enough resources to listen to their customers. I cannot tell you how many companies ask me to help them improve their customer service, yet when I ask them for their customer feedback (to get some idea of where to start), they don't have any customer feedback at all, or very little. I feel this is one of the biggest mistakes in customer service there is.
If you are thinking, "I don't have any customers," think again. We all have customers; just some of them are internal to our organizations like our co-workers and our boss. When was the last time you asked your boss, "If you could change one thing about the way I do my job, what would it be?" or asked a co-worker how you could work better as a team?
"We/I must be doing okay," you think. "We/I don't hear that many complaints." Well, you could be very mistaken. I'm sure you have heard the statistics that only one in 26 unhappy customers complains. So, if you have 10 complaining customers. Well, you do the math.
It is especially critical to implement an external customer service program to constantly get customer feedback. Many organizations are afraid to ask their customers what they think of their service because they think they will get too many complaints. That is exactly what you want! Favorable feedback is good, too, but even if you get mostly complaints, it is good that at least you are getting some feedback from your customers.
After all, how are you going to know what you are doing wrong so that you can fix it? Don't be like the bank who assumed that one of the reasons for their poor customer service ratings was that its tellers were not making enough eye contact with the customers or greeting them in a friendly manner.
The bank trained the tellers to be friendlier, smile more, greet customers by name and use eye contact. Now that kind of training didn't hurt; after all, those are important elements in the customer service mix. But the training didn't result in their customers being any happier because they didn't get to the real cause of their customers' unhappiness with the service.
The bank, after surveying their customers, later found that what really satisfied their customers the most was completing their transactions in a reasonable time. Yes, being friendly and making eye contact was an important factor, but if the tellers could not answer the most important needs of the customer - namely fast service - their customers would not be totally satisfied. Are you making this mistake?
Assuming you know what your customers want and then delivering that? Don't guess at what your customers want, get busy and find out? both internal and external.
