By Vic Pichette, owner of Eye on Success, a Customer Service Consulting Business; and U.S. Bar Spotters, a Hospitality Consulting Business located in Rhode Island.
It doesn’t matter what type of business you own: Retail, Hospitality, Banking, Real Estate, Hotels and Motels, Resorts, Car Sales, Home Sales, Financial Services or any business that deals with customers on a regular basis. Business owners and managers have accepted that it’s ok to provide mediocre or poor customer service. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t receive lousy customer service, and as a customer service consultant who believes that providing great customer service should be easy and inexpensive, experiencing what I experience everyday simply astonishes me. I just want to grab the owner or manager and shake some common sense in them.
My friends, what the heck is so hard about treating the very people that pay your salaries, like human beings? I don’t get it, I won’t accept it, and I am on a mission to change the way companies assess and train employees in the future.
Providing quality customer service has become such a burdensome task, that companies have accepted that poor or mediocre customer service is the norm. It’s not the norm, and in most cases creating a great customer experience is so simple and easy, that we have lost sight of what matters the most…The Basics.
Don’t get me wrong, I know most companies care about their customers and want to provide a great customer experience. But if they continue to hire Secret Shoppers to assess their employees, and High Priced Consultants and Trainers to teach customer service, than they will continue to fail. And here’s why.
For High Priced Consultants and trainers to make the “High Prices”, they need to convince you, (the business owner), that providing quality customer service is so difficult that you must continue to pay for their high priced services. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. Go to Google and type in Customer Service Consultants and take a look at what you see. What you’ll see are companies offering thirty different types of services and programs, diagrams, pie charts, and a host of additional services. They have management with PhD’s, thirty years’ experience, and employees with training, marketing, and related skills.
Do you really need all of these skills to teach your employees how to treat your customers with a little respect and dignity? Not only does it not work and cost a small fortune, but if it did work, wouldn’t you have great customer service?
Imagine what people fifty years ago would think about our customer service today. Remember the 1960’s TV shows? Remember people walking in a bank and were greeted by a manager or teller with a big smile, a hand shake, and they knew their names. Or when they went to a retail establishment and were happily greeted with enthusiasm and kindness.
How much money and resources does it take for your employees to be happy to see a customer, to greet a customer with a smile, to look them in the eye and ask them if they need help? Mastering great customer service is more about being human, than anything else.
These are four simple ways to create a great customer service for our customers
1: You need a way of assessing your staff and operation accurately.
2: You need to train your staff on the basics of great customer service using an easy, inexpensive and quick method.
3: You need to continue to re-assess your staff on a regular basis to ensure compliance.
4: And once your employees are trained properly, and future assessments are above 90%, you must compensate your employees.
You do this and I promise your customers will compensate you handsomely.
Now here’s the problem. To assess your staff accurately and properly, most companies turn to secret shopping companies to provide a “true and realistic customer experience”. This is where the failure starts. Think about this for a minute? There are multi-million dollar business using “everyday people off the street” (Secret Shoppers) who are paid five or ten dollars, sometimes nothing, to assess their staff and business operation as a means to make serious business decisions. A secret shopper is like a robot with a checklist. I have read hundreds of secret shopping reports, and quite frankly, they are useless. They are not accurate, just ask your staff, and they provide no beneficial business assessment information that you can use to make important changes.
A secret shopper is someone with no vested interest in your business, they have no interest in the secret shopping company because they are paid peanuts, and they have no idea of what they see and put in the report will be beneficial to the company. Trust me, relying on a check list to make proper business decisions does not work. If it did, you would have great customer service.
And customer surveys do not work….
Why are we different? Because our “Secret Shoppers” are employees of our company, who are trained and understand instinctively what a “Typical Customer” wants when it comes to customer service. We also wear covert video cameras so we can videotape our interactions with your staff. I promise you, if you use my company Eye on Success to assess your employees on customer service, product knowledge, brand compliance and merchandising, your employees will become the best in the industry, and your company will grow.
Imagine watching your employees interacting with your customers on video, and using that video as a training tool for the employee, and later the staff? Using our “Point of View Video Assessments” as a way of assessing and training employees is the most accurate, fast, easy, and inexpensive way to GREAT CUSTOMER SERVICE…
If you own or run a business that deals with customers on a regular basis, please consider using our professional evaluation and training techniques. I promise, we will quickly turn around your performance assessments, and more importantly, make your customers thrilled to go back to your businesses.
Vic Pichette is an author, trainer and owner of Eye on Success (www.eyeonsuccess.net) a professional customer service consultant firm located in Rhode Island. At Eye on Success, we assess businesses and employees using video, and we teach companies how to easily and inexpensively provide great customer service.
Vic can be reached at 401-225-4104 or e-mailed at eyeonsuccess@cox.net
