Business Success with CRM

Take care of your customers or someone else will

  

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Peter Drucker was known for stating the obvious, "that the purpose of a business is to create customers".  And to take this a step further, no business can stay in business without customers. As a customer yourself, have you been sadly mistreated by some business and later found that the business steadily gets worse and then is gone?  Poor quality service has probably doomed as many businesses as poor quality products.

Recently the famous Harvey Mackay had published an article "Take care of your customers or someone else will".  He refers to John Tschohl as the "guru of customer service" who received that moniker from USA Today, Time andEntrepreneur magazines. "After 31 years focused solely on customer service, he is president of Service Quality Institute, which has representatives in 40 countries.  He's authored hundreds of articles and six best-selling books."- Harvey Mackay

How to Create a Service Culture

Harvey asked John how a company goes about creating a service culture. John broke it down into six steps:" 

1. Understand you're in the service business.  Most companies think they're in manufacturing and retail.  It's a paradigm switch.  Southwest Airlines is successful because they understand they're a customer service company.  They just happen to be an airline.
2. Look at all the policies, procedures and systems that you've got in place that make life miserable for customers.  You could have the nicest people in the world, but you could have stupid hours, stupid rules, stupid procedures, that irritate customers.  And they won't come back.
3. Have empowerment.  Every single employee has to be able to make fast and powerful decisions on the spot, and they better be in favor of the customer.
4. Be more careful about who you hire.  The service leaders hire one out of 50 applicants, sometimes one out of 100, but they're very, very, very careful.  You've got to look for the cream, the A players, instead of bringing on B and C players.
5. Educate and train the whole staff on the art of customer service with something new and fresh virtually every four to six months.  There is no magic speaker, no magic training program.  No matter if you have a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand employees, you better have something new and fresh so it's constantly in front of them, so when they go to work, they say, "Fantastic -- I'm taking care of customers."
6. Then measure the results financially, so you know the impact it's making on revenue, on profit and on market share.  You have to track the numbers so you understand that it's worth the time and effort."

Five Critical Elements Necessary for Breakaway Service

Harvey goes on to say "John's methods shouldn't shock anyone -- and it's likely that most successful businesses are doing some of those things.  But I think it's the commitment to following through on all six that establishes the service culture.  As I tell our staff at MackayMitchell Envelope Company, "We aren't selling envelopes.  We're selling people."

But that's not the end of John's advice.  I asked him to describe the five critical elements necessary for breakaway service.  He didn't hesitate.

First, he said you have to have speed.  "How do you shrink the time by 90 percent?  If it normally takes 10 days to do something for a customer, how do you do it in one day?  That's speed.  Speed is not going from ten hours to nine hours.  Speed allows you to differentiate in the marketplace."  He cites Amazon's emphasis on speed as a great example.

Second, he reiterated the importance of empowerment.  "They've got to do whatever they've got to do, on the spot, so the customer walks away off the Internet, out of the store, on the phone -- however they were interfacing -- and they think they have touched heaven."  The most important person in every single company is the frontline employee.

Third, quality in whatever service or product you're selling is essential.

Fourth is service.  "And if you took the two words, quality and service, they're highly intangible."  So if you asked 100 customers to define "quality service," there would be 100 different answers.

Finally, John stresses the importance of using the customer's name, remembering the customer, and making them feel special.  He described his experiences with an Apple retail store, which combines technology, speed, quality and service.  They dominate the competition because they understand how the combination works." - Harvey Mackay

Calls for a Customer Relationship and Management System 

It is thus extremely important to have a shared, centralized database system for keeping track of the customer preferences, past communications and the future promised committments -that is the importance of having a CRM system - to improve your success with CRM. With a key understanding of CRM strategy and benefits can lead to predictable success.

A thank you goes out to to Harvey Mackay for sharing John's advice. Sign up for his blog for more insights and actions.

Reprinted with permission from nationally syndicated columnist Harvey Mackay, author of the New York Times #1 bestseller "Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive."

Visit this article and other words of widsom on his web site. Go here to revieve email updates like this from Harvey.

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