Help Senior Executives Improve Their Customer Service
In the world of contemporary business, customer service is a key influence. Senior management often focuses on improving and perfecting customer relations. Yet many employees, particularly those working with customers day-to-day, learn that senior executive policies may fall short.
Why Customer Service Is Critical
Unless your company faces little competition, customer service and relations are critical to corporate success. Regardless of the quality, pricing, or availability of your products, your company needs satisfied, repeat customer purchases to achieve long-term success.
It doesn’t matter whether you sell to individual consumers or in a business-to-business (B2B) universe, the critical component to consistent high sales volume is customer satisfaction. Your senior management is acutely aware of this importance.
The equation is simple. When your customer base is satisfied and happy, they will continue to buy from your company. Should your customers become dissatisfied, your gross income will suffer.
All statistics and every study ever compiled display that it is much easier and more cost effective to keep and satisfy current customers than expending time, money, and corporate energy to recruit new ones. You can assume that your senior management team intimately understands this reality.
Why Senior Management Sometimes Misses Customer Satisfaction Targets
Executive management, advertising, and company branding actions always promise superior customer service. Yet, experienced “in the trenches” employees and customers often experience results far below promises.
A common complaint from consumers and, at times, the business media, is that senior management often misses the mark—widely. Unhappy consumers consistently believe that while senior management espouses superior customer service, they seldom “walk the walk.”
They may have a valid point. Simply supporting or mandating excellent customer service seldom motivates staff to deliver the desired product. It’s up to you, the employee, to deliver management’s promises to your customers. Similar to mandating customer loyalty, which must be earned, promising outstanding customer service and fulfilling that promise is based on actions, not rhetoric.
Surveys of C-level executives and customer service professionals reveal some vast differences in perceived reality. Senior executives often perceive their company’s customer service much differently than those who work in this area daily. This gap appears to cause the discrepancy in C-level and actual customer attitudes.
How Employees Can Help Bridge the Customer Service Level Gap
Your feedback, delivered respectfully and appropriately, can help senior management better understand the real customer service function and responsibility. Become a resource to open-minded senior executives to help improve your company’s customer relations.
- Understand that C-level executives think strategically, while customer service professionals tend to think operationally. Senior executives must approach business issues strategically, while you may, by equal necessity, tackle operational requirements. Similar to precise translations on a global stage that involve differences in meaning, senior executives sometimes issue non-translatable policies for superior customer service.
- Accept that senior management often equates high revenues and customer satisfaction with pure transactional speed and operational efficiency. Because of their responsibilities, senior management sometimes assumes that strong sales and customer volume equals the speed and cost effectiveness of operations. Senior executives can easily decide that available technology and revenue strength equates to superior customer service.
- Receiving and communicating honest customer feedback is critically important to improving customer service. Receiving, recording, and communicating real world customer feedback can help senior management better understand and improve customer satisfaction procedures. Senior executives want this feedback and treasure its indicators which help improve their understanding and policy creation. You can be an important intermediary in this process.
- Use your experience to find a “cure” for customer service shortcomings and translate your ideas to management. While you lack the power to “force” senior management to listen to and consider your ideas to cure customer service deficiencies, you can offer solutions in a thoughtful and professional manner. Instead of merely complaining about current procedures or offering your solutions to your peers at “water cooler” chats, organize your thoughts and professionally present them to management. Nothing compares to a good idea, clearly presented to the “right” people, to spark an important change in policy or procedure to benefit the company.
Do not feel frustrated or powerless when you witness senior management mandate improved customer relations while requiring some procedures that generate the opposite result. Be proactive and use your customer service experience to develop ideas that work in the real world. Then communicate these ideas to those who understand and can affect the changes that will achieve the customer service goal.