How does Great Customer Service Win?

During my more than 16 years of career, I do have numerous success stories of win-over customer satisfaction by providing best software delivery & support.

I would like to give you few critical attributes that plays a vital role in providing best service andwin over customer gratification. These findings are not only applicable to software customers but too in any customer other oriented business.

First and foremost is Alignment…..

Each and Every single entity of your organization should be properly aligned and work towards same goals… In another words, each entity (be it Employees, Teams and Departments, Divisions etc) can have their own goals and priorities but those goals & priorities to be aligned toorganizational goals and priorities. Once each of these entities are aligned then if their individual goals and objectives are being achieved then it will leading to achieve organizational Goals.

Next critical attribute is 'Empowerment'.

You should empower your each stakeholders, be it your customer, your value chain, your leaders, your employees / junior team members…. To the lowest level....

Once these all people are empowered then they can do their best to achieve a smallest amount success. On one hand setting up processes are a road map to work in discipline and achieving the success and at the same time, empowering people associates with it, leads to take their own decision to reduce the time-lines and delivering the best in shorter time and in innovative way.

Next Critical point is - Customer Focused.

Your entire value chain should be Customer Focus. Everyone should understand that it is the customer who brings bread & butter… who is actually paying you salary, not your employer……without revenue you can't run in longer duration…. And the satisfying customer's is not only the job of specific people or team (like senior management, marketing, sales or service), rather it is the core responsibilities of each and every individual. For example, in a car manufacturingcompany, Senior Management, sales, marketing or after-sales-service teams are helpless, if their R&D, Engineering and Manufacturing teams are not customer focused and they didn'tIncorporated the exact expectations of customer. More specifically, if the car doesn't have best quality parts, how come customers will appreciate that car and then nothing much left to do for Senior Management, Sales, Marketing and After-Sales-Service Teams.

Next most important is "Be Listener"……..

Each of your entity of value chain should be "best listener"…The earlier days people thinking is best speaker is a best leader. But those days are gone, Best Listener is a Best Leader. Until you will not listen, you will not get the exact problem. Good Listener also helps to understand the customer viewpoint, by wearing the customer's hat.

Last but not least, "Never ever defend"…

This point is also must with last point "Listener"…. When you listen while wearing the customer's hat, then only you can understand the real pain of the customer.

Many times it has been observed that teams goes into defending themselves or their viewpoint, which is leading to greater level of dissatisfaction of customer. Take the example of software industry, requirement management is a critical in project success. At the same time, mostly customer is not expert to depicting their expectations, therefore, analyst and domain experts from software / consulting firms plays vital role in depicting the customer's expectations. Hence in case of requirement change only customer shouldn't be held responsible. I am not advocating to accept the requirements even at last stage, but there should be proper road map and plan to incorporate the requirement change. Agile Project Development approach also focuses on accepting the requirement change. In my future posts, I will give more details in Agile Development.

Coming back to defending on organizational viewpoint, gives impression as "rigidness". Since your each action is resulting to customer focus and hence you are not authorize to decide that your action is right or wrong. It is the customer who will decide.

There may be more points, that add value to achieve customer satisfaction, but I feel these points are critical, most important and at abstract level….irrespective of your nature of business or nature of service or nature of customer.

In case of further clarifications, feel free to get back to me. You can also add me into your network for knowledge & experience sharing or feel free to directly communicating me on my email ids for any current or future challenges.

SURYA KANT GOYAL

Project Director, Exensys