Your customers should NOT be your Guinea pigs

Whilst conducting team building facilitation for a customer this weekend, the need for internal customer service came out strongly as one of the key tenets of nurturing a strong team. In the process of wrapping up the debrief form various activities, I asserted that it is not in good order to use your customers as Guinea pigs. If it is indeed a corporate’s desire to upscale their customer service standards and offer exemplary customer service experiences   to their customers, isn’t the age old adage ‘practice makes perfect’ highly applicable?

And hot on the heels of this is the question – where does one practice? Where does one perfect their art? Where does one start to follow through on Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule http://gladwell.com/outliers/the-10000-hour-rule/ ?

Whereas leadership and mainstream staff may not be too in touch with the value of the return on investment on internal customer service programmes and initiatives and the systems to measure this still a touch and go affair, what’s pretty clear to them is that an organization’s commitment to customer service pays dividends in terms of patronage and loyalty.

So……………….if practice makes perfect and we’d like to perfect our customer service skills, where do we practice? Doesn’t it naturally fall in place that we are our own best ‘test drive’ candidates? Our colleagues are easy, accessible and readily available targets for target practice at the firing range to get our ‘bulls eye’ skills perfected yes? It therefore behooves us to practice our business etiquette, emotional intelligence, synergy, win-win, really listening, negotiation and service failure recovery skills in the workplace right?

Imagine an organization where internal phone calls are picked with dignity, problems are resolved with a win-win attitude and team members uphold each other and support each other to provide service delivery with a smile to their other team mates. Wouldn’t this be the epitome of greatness from within? These teams wouldn’t need prompting or to put in effort to transfer this same experience to external customers, for it wouldn’t be an alien practice, but an extension of their ‘way of being’.

The rousing call right away is to determine what your organization’s ‘Way of Being’ is and practise like crazy internally to deliver seamless customer delight always………….