Watch Out World it’s National Customer Service Week
4 Oct 2010 by Dick Branston
It is not enough to have satisfied customers. At UKFast we want Raving Fans.
Imagine people telling their friends over a drink how great we are. To drive this vision and find more fans we are using National Customer Service week to focus our efforts and passion. I am amazed that more companies do not use the opportunity to reflect on their service, reward it and ask themselves ‘what more can we do?’. Super star service separates the great from the good and yet most people I ask find it hard to recall a company who have really blown them away with excellent service.
I joined UKFast a month ago in the new role of Head of Customer Service. I’ve been blown away by the boundless energy of the team here and their willingness to continually improve. Yes … we’ve won customer service awards before. Yes … we’ve established sustainable service training. Yes … we’ve got an escalation process. Yes … this is only the beginning.
There is a well known saying “What gets measured gets managed and what gets managed gets better”. I am focussed on measuring the right things. Raving Fans is my most valued metric. Creating a Raving Fan is confirmation we are doing things right, establishes pride and genuinely makes our hard work worthwhile. On the flip side we truly value clients with issues which may get escalated to the management layer. They are an opportunity to demonstrate we care and that we can handle problems and learn lessons to improve our people and processes for the future.
In computer software and hardware you can never promise there will not be issues, but you can promise you will provide your clients with a world class service that pro-actively handles situations in a professional and flexible manner. I want to share some of the actions we are taking this week in our mission to create UKFast Raving Fans.
Our National Customer Service Week Plan:
- Present ‘Service Superstar’ awards to our greatest service advocates. This includes all our staff. We don’t just serve our clients, we serve each other. We want to reward the supportive, passionate, professional and consistent members of our team and promote them as role models.
- Produce a book of “UKFast – Service Stories To Sing About”. A collection of UKFast staff comments on which companies they love and why. The title may change once I’ve spoken with our PR team!
- Run a set of workshops with staff to draft a set of client promises also known as a customer credo.
- Visit some local clients for donut drop-offs to simply say “hello” and ask them the three most important customer service things to them.
- Produce a video of all our service activities and release it as a summary for everyone to view online.
- Deliver improvements to our internal tools and processes. Our clients and marketing team may not rave about this milestone. But, world class service is not just the product of polite professional staff. Companies require a flexible infrastructure to deliver to client expectations.
Steven Tyler of Aerosmith once sung that ‘life is a journey not a destination’. Customer service is a journey and we’ve hit a new crossroads. There is a tremendous energy focussed on steering us down the road filled with Raving Fans where we over deliver and ensure we are continually improving our service. I feel like I’ve been handed the keys to an Aston Martin with a few scratches, but thankfully it’s full of fuel and each time I press the accelerator my smile turns into a boyish grin. We are measuring our service, we are passionate about great service and we are committed to taking action to continually improve our service. With these three key ingredients it is going to be one fantastic ride.
Ross Keeping
Head of Customer Service
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As if I wasn’t impassioned enough about my upcoming interview with yourselves this week, this has now set it into overdrive. True appreciation of what AMAZING customer service can be, rather than the model that many companies subscribe to which is one of pure lip service, saying one thing, but then delivering something far removed.
Bring on the interview, simply put, I can hardly wait.
[...] couldn’t agree more with Ross Keeping’s opening remark in his blog earlier this week: “It is not enough to have satisfied customers. At UKFast we want Raving Fans.” By [...]
Good luck in your new role. Your reference to a book about the success stories reminds me of Zappos’ culture book. You can get a copy of it from their web site. Might be worth checking out. Not sure how big your contact centre is, but check out Yammer, if you don’t know it already. It is like Twitter but used by companies for their employees. It is a fantastic tool for bringing employees and their knowledge closer together. We used it as Carphone Warehouse, where I helped set up the use of social media. Once again, good luck.
[...] a raving fan of Customer Service Week. We’ve had a really successful one celebrating and focusing on the importance of excellent [...]