8 Ways to Recognise and Celebrate Customer Service

As a retail management system provider, customer service is something we place a strong focus on, pledging continuous improvement to ensure we’re providing retailers with the best possible experience both for their business and their customers.

With this week being National Customer Service Week, we caught up with our client services director Ed Micklewright to get his thoughts on the changing face of customer service and the importance of recognising and celebrating great customer service, which is one of the key themes for the week. Read Ed’s insights below and make sure to follow us on Twitter @Cybertill throughout the week to see more ways we’re getting involved.

Ed Micklewright – client services director at Cybertill

When asked for my definition of great customer service, my immediate thought is that it’s making a customer feel their business is valued. It’s providing them with the best possible customer journey and ultimately, for us, making them feel like they want to be a partner with our business.

My path to becoming a client services director began when I was a sales manager, a role in which I slowly began to deal with some customer issues, something that taught me a lot about customer service and led me to my passion for it today.

In general terms, when I came into this field, customers were happy to carry out a purchase and providing they got what it said on the tin they didn’t want much more than just the basic transaction. The world wasn’t multi-channel, we weren’t as reliant on the internet and the economy was strong.

Fast forward and the recession changed a lot, as did the growth of the internet and people’s move towards the use of browsers and smart devices to run their lives and businesses. Nowadays, customers want value for money but they also want to feel valued, with a demand for customer service to be a key feature over and above the basic transaction.

The economy is becoming more relationship led rather than transaction led. Expectations from customers have definitely increased dramatically in recent years. We are seeing customers demand a true multi-channel experience and a relationship with us as a vendor, which we are more than happy to do.

One theme from National Customer Service Week I wanted to focus on is ‘recognise and celebrate’. Creating a positive attitude and behaviour between colleagues in a business that wants to continually improve its performance offers many benefits. It means that staff get on with each other better, they’re more open to sharing ideas and more willing to collaborate to deliver a better experience.

If staff are improving processes and improving systems, knowledge and behaviours, then our customers see the benefit at every interaction, whether that be an enhanced experience with our software, support, training, or communications. The customer journey gets better, and that’s what we’re striving for.

You should always celebrate success just like you should always work hard on areas that can be improved. In my experience, cultural change requires buy in from everybody and it’s absolutely key that everybody understands the journey that you’re putting them on, where they’re going, why they’re going there and what they can expect when they get there. So it’s only fair when people display exemplary standards of behaviour, directly in line with the journey that you’re on, that they get recognised for doing so.

It’s important as a marker to show that the journey is succeeding. Success breeds success and people want to be part of something that’s positive. Celebrating success helps keep the vision in people’s minds and enforces that positivity – and of course not forgetting that it can also be fun to celebrate!

Here are eight ways we recognise and celebrate customer service that could be translated across any business:

1. Four or five times a year we hold staff events that combine a serious theme of customer service with fun activities and free food, this gets everybody talking in a relaxed manner and the business comes together to help keep our customer service profile in the forefront of people’s mind

2. We ‘sponsor’ National Customer Service Week with breakfasts, quizzes and competitions to bring staff together and again keep customer service objectives prominent

3. Every month I send out an email to all 96 staff celebrating great examples of both internal and external customer service – each individual comment we receive is then displayed on a testimonials wall within the office as a daily reminder

4. Every month all staff are asked to nominate a colleague for the employee appreciation award in which a staff member receives a certificate along with a thank you gift

5. We constantly update notice boards around the business where we keep staff informed of progress within customer services

6. We also ask staff for their input, suggestions, comments and feedback on customer service to gain further insight into how we’re doing as a business

7. Once a quarter we issue an internal staff survey which includes elements of customer service and we also survey our customer base about customer satisfaction to ask for feedback on how we’re doing

8. Once a year we run an interactive customer services training program for the whole company

In summary, we do a number of things to keep customer service in the forefront of people’s minds to send a message that we do care and we do make changes so that we can deliver an ever improving customer experience. Our aim is to win an award for the greatest improvement in the customer journey and to ultimately be the retail management system provider of choice for any retailer in our chosen markets.