How to Not Sound Like a Telemarketer

by Mike Brooks, http://www.mrinsidesales.com/
I don't know about you but I can always tell when a telemarketer is cold calling me. From the moment they begin speaking, "Hi is that Mr. Brooks?"

to the way they mechanically read their scripts, I have them pegged before they get past their first sentence. And like I'm sure it is with you, too, I am immediately not interested.

If you are reading this article, it probably means you have to pick up the phone - either to make appointments, call prospects back, return calls to clients, etc. - and if so, then you need to learn how to sound natural on the phone and avoid putting your prospects, gatekeepers, assistants, etc., on notice that you're trying to sell something.

The way you do that is by learning how to sound like you're not selling anything, and you do that by learning how to disarm prospects, sound natural yet professional, and how to be friendly without being phony. Use these 5 techniques to not only sound natural on the phone, but to also close more business:

# 1 - Always use the prospect's first name. I know that there are two schools of thought on this, one being that you should show respect for someone you don't know and so use either Mr. or Mrs., but I don't agree. I think you can show respect for someone by being courteous and professional, and I think you're going to make a lot more progress if you use a person's first name. Here are the two reasons to do so:

a. First, by using a person's first name you aren't immediately signaling that you're a sales person! How do you feel when someone you don't know calls you and addresses you by "Mr." or "Mrs."? Also, when you use a person's first name, you are starting the call on equal footing, without giving them all the power.

b. Second, everyone likes the sound of their own name. In fact, psychologists have found that everyone's favorite word is their first name! By starting with that you are immediately making a connection, and a personal one at that.

#2 - Be polite. You'd be surprised by how many sales reps still try to trick or get around gatekeepers and assistants, and how many are even rude in doing so. Always, always use please and thank you when speaking with anyone over the phone (or in person for that matter).

Words like "please" and "thank you" go a long way when trying to make a connection with a prospect, and they work especially well when you're trying to get through to a prospect also. Examine your current scripts now and do all you can to insert the proper courtesies wherever you can.

#3 - Be brief. Most reps go into pitch mode the moment they reach their prospect, and it's no surprise they can't wait to get the rep off the phone. I review scripts all the time that essentially read the company's brochure to the prospect the moment they reach them.

You can turn that around and sound so much better by briefly delivering your presentation and checking in with your prospect. Try things like:

a. Briefly _________, the reason I'm calling is that we've been working with many companies like yours, and I just wanted to see if we could help you as well. Can I ask you just a couple of questions to see if we'd be a fit for you?

b. __________, you probably get a lot of calls like these, so I'll be brief. I'll just ask you a couple of quick questions and if I think we can save you between 15 to 20% I'll let you know and, if not, we'll part friends, is that OK?

Get the idea?

#4 - Make a connection. This is one of the easiest of all and it's a great way to get your prospect talking. All you do is find something that you know is affecting your other clients (like new laws in their industry), and ask how it's affecting your new prospect as well. Try:

a. "You know ________ a lot of my clients have told me of the changes they are having to make because of (the new law/change in regulation, etc.), how is that affecting you?"

b. "__________ what are you planning to feature at the September trade show?"

By addressing something that they are dealing with now, you can instantly make a connection and get valuable information. Warning: you have to fit this in after you've established rapport, and you have to address something that is relevant to them.

#5 - Listen more. This may not sound like a way to sound natural on the phone, but believe me, it's probably the most important of all. Because most sales reps are so busy talking at their prospect, they usually lose them at the beginning. In most cases, the prospect has turned off and are just waiting for an appropriate pause to get rid of the rep.

By listening you actually create space for your prospect to speak (and to think), and because of that you are allowing the conversation to flow.
When you give the prospect a chance to get their thoughts and feedback out, they feel comfortable with you, and that is the best way for the conversation to unfold naturally. Hit your mute button after you ask a question and count three 1000's if you're having trouble remaining quiet.

There you have it - five easy ways to avoid sounding like a telemarketer and ways to sound more natural on the phone. The good news is that they are easy to implement, and, once you do, you'll make more connections and you'll feel more comfortable on the phone. And this will come across to your prospects and you'll end up qualifying better leads and making more sales.

If you found this article helpful, then you will love Mike’s: “The Complete Book of Phone Scripts,” which is packed with word for word scripts and techniques that you can begin using today to make more appointments and more sales. You can read about it by clicking here:
http://www.mrinsidesales.com/scripts.htm

Mike Brooks, Mr. Inside Sales, works with business owners and inside sales reps throughout the US, teaching them the skills, strategies and techniques of top 20% performance.

UK HR Update

Another great HR update from Sandra Beale:

Managing a Disciplinary - Employer 5 top tips!

1. Ensure you undertake a thorough investigation leaving no stone unturned. Take comprehensive witness statements from all witnesses which are signed and dated. The investigator should be an independent manager.

2. Invite the employee to a disciplinary hearing giving plenty of notice and providing all written evidence against them. Provide the right to be accompanied.

3. Ensure the employee has adequate time to give their version of events at hearing. Adjourn to investigate new evidence if necessary and reconvene at a later date if appropriate. Ensure the process is documented by a note taker.

4. Ensure the decision from the hearing is appropriate. If in doubt do not dismiss!

5. Ensure the employee has the right to appeal and the hearing is chaired by an independent more senior manager.

Coalition document: Key implications for employers

Here are the key implications for employers from the new coalition document produced by the new liberal/conservative government:

Jobs and pensions
The government says it will scrap all existing welfare-to-work programmes and create a single welfare-to-work programme to help all unemployed people get back into work.

• It vows to ensure that Jobseekers' Allowance claimants facing the most significant barriers to work are referred to the new welfare-to-work programme immediately.
• The document outlines "support" for the national minimum wage, although there is no stated commitment to raising it.
• The government will commit to establishing an independent commission to review the long-term affordability of public sector pensions, while protecting accrued rights.
Retirement age
• The government will "phase out" the default retirement age of 65 and hold a review to set the date at which the state pension age starts to rise to 66, although it will not be sooner than 2016 for men and 2020 for women.
Immigration
• The two parties have agreed to the Conservative commitment to introduce an annual limit on the number of non-EU economic migrants admitted into the UK to live and work - despite the Liberal Democrats' strong opposition to the move. They will jointly consider the mechanism for implementing the limit.

Equality
This section has perhaps the clearest Liberal Democrat imprint, with the government vowing to promote equal pay and take a range of measures to end discrimination in the workplace, including:

• Extending the right to request flexible working to all employees, consulting with business on how best to do so
• Undertaking a fair pay review in the public sector to implement the proposed '20 times' pay multiple - ensuring that no public sector worker can earn over 20 times more than the lowest-paid person in their organisation
• Promoting gender equality on the boards of listed companies.
Legislation
• The document outlines the commitment to cutting red tape by introducing a 'one-in, one-out' rule whereby no new regulation is brought in without other regulation being cut by a greater amount.
• The government promises to review employment and workplace laws for employers and employees, to ensure they maximise flexibility for both parties while protecting fairness and providing the competitive environment required for enterprise to thrive.
• It also vows to reinstate an Operating and Financial Review to ensure that directors' social and environmental duties have to be covered in company reporting, and investigate further ways of improving corporate accountability and transparency.
• The coalition will seek to ensure an injection of private capital into Royal Mail, including opportunities for employee ownership, while retaining the Post Office in public ownership.

There are also plans to undertake a wholesale review of employment law in the UK. An area which the Conservative's have previously considered ripe for reform is employment tribunal system. Their pre-election policy paper contained a commitment "to ensure the system offers fast, cheap and accessible justice which is fair to all sides" and to address perceived inconsistencies in the tribunal system and deter weak claims.

The National Minimum Wage is to be retained, the Government acknowledging the protection it gives low-income workers and the incentives to work it provides. It remains to be seen whether and by how much the rate will increase or whether the age bandings will be retained.
Longer term goals likely to be introduced reasonably early in the life of this government are "family friendly" changes including an extension to the right to request flexible working to all employees, steps to encourage shared parenting from the earliest stages of pregnancy – including the promotion of a system of flexible parental leave and support for the provision of free nursery care for pre-school children.

ACAS – Free Guide to Managing Performance
ACAS has published a new free guide on managing performance including dealing with potential problems, see http://www.acas.org.uk/CHttpHandler.ashx?id=2714&p=0

Free Occupational Health Advice
For free occupational health advice call the Health for Work Advice Line on 0800 0 7788 44. Run by the NHS this invaluable service can help employers get staff back to work quickly and fairly after sickness absence. Alternatively the service can help with disability issues and ill health terminations and retirements. For more details see http://www.health4work.nhs.uk/

The Fit Note – FREE HR Factsheet
Need to know more about the new fit note that replaced the old sick note from 6 April 2010? Sandra has prepared a comprehensive FREE fact sheet. This is available on her website on the useful hr articles page or you can email her for a copy.

Email: info@sjbealehrconsult.co.uk
www.sjbealehrconsult.co.uk

Thanks Sandra!

What sort of leader does it take....

... to capture poachers, go undercover and lead a remote team that works in a huge jungle?

At the moment I'm working closely with a conservation organisation, Fauna & Flora International. I found out about a most extraordinary leader - someone who has a job that is in may ways enviable, in others most certainly not.

She is a project leader in Indonesia, working to protect the Sumatran Tiger's preserve in the Kerinci Seblat National Park.

I would love to interview her because she has challenges that I don't think any business leaders face; and I'm sure we could learn from her.

Firstly, in a male dominated society, she is a woman in charge of a workforce that is predominantly. Secondly, she is not a native of the country where she works. Thirdly she faces daily danger not only from the local fauna (the most threatening of which is probably the mosquito rather than the tiger) but from the poachers who are armed, dangerous and have every intention of continuing to 'harvest' tiger body parts and skin. It is an extremely profitable and entirely illegal enterprise.

She works in an environment which is hostile - internet connection is patchy and even telecommunications are not the simplest. She manages a remote team who cover thousands of hectares of wild forest and who have to be away from their families for months at a time.

All I can say is that having heard so much about this lady from her colleagues, I would very much like to meet her and find out what the key qualities are that she has that makes her such a succesful leader and, above all, so good at her job that the tigers in her region are actually increasing.

She has to manage the teams, the politics, the morale of her workforce and a challenging situation in so many ways.

So here's my questions for you; if you could ask her three questions, what would they be?
And if you were suddenly posted to a position like this (within your field of expertise, but with similar challenges), what are the key leadership skills you think you would need to be as successful?

Post your replies here or email me on info at completetrainer dot com.


Photograph (C) Fauna & Flora International

Questions to Help Open Up the Sale

By Mike Brooks, Mr. Inside Sales

Have you ever been in a closing situation that seems to have stalled, where your prospect isn’t really objecting, but they sure aren’t going where you want them to go? Sometimes during a close you’ll find it necessary to sort of re-open the close, to keep your prospect talking, and to find out exactly what is on their mind.

This is especially true when you’re not sure how to respond to an objection or to how your prospect or client feels about a specific point or feature. It is times like these that you need to just ask a question and let your prospect tell you which direction you need to go in, or how you should respond.

Use the following questions to help open your prospect up and to get them to reveal where they really stand, and what you need to do to close the
sale:

“I can tell that’s important to you; why does it mean so much?”

“Let me see if I have this right. You (restate what they said), right?
What would have to change for this to work for you then?”

“Do I have that right?”

“What else do I need to know to understand how this affects your operation?”

“How would you react if I told you we could handle that and give you this?”

“Can you give me more detail on that?”

“What is your perspective on this?”

“And what has led you to feel that way?”

“What is your experience with this (solution)?”

“When was the last time you tried this?”

“What would have made it work better for you?”

“If you went ahead with this, what would be the worse thing that could happen?”

“I hear you saying X, but I’m also hearing something else. Could you elaborate on that please?”

“And if you didn’t move on this solution today, how are you going to change your results and get more (leads, sales, production, etc.)?”

“Do you see how this (your solution) has been designed to fix your exact problem?”

“How is this sounding so far?”

“I see where you’re coming from. How did you arrive at that?”

“What leads you to believe that?”

If you found these questions helpful, then you will love Mike’s Ebook:
“The Complete Book of Phone Scripts,” which is packed with word for word scripts and techniques that you can begin using today to make more appointments and more sales. You can read about it by clicking here: http://www.completetrainer.co.uk/Training_Books/Complete_Book_of_Phone_Scripts


Mike Brooks, Mr. Inside Sales, works with business owners and inside sales reps throughut the US teaching them the skills, strategies and techniques of top 20% performance. If you’re looking to catapult your sales, or create a sales team that actually makes their monthly revenues, then learn how by visiting: http://www.mrinsidesales.com/

Thanks Mike, another great article! If you'd like to publish your articles here, then please contact us

A guide to 360

A brief introduction to 360 degree feedback systems and their potential uses, by David Cooper


1. What is 360 degree feedback?
360 degree feedback (or multi source feedback) was first introduced in its current form in the 1970s and has its roots in executive management and leadership performance improvement.

The overall aim of the feedback exercise is to raise awareness of the participant to their known and unknown strengths and additionally to appropriate opportunities for development and continuous performance improvement.


The underpinning concept is to provide participants with the opportunity to see themselves as others see them. Quantitative and qualitative feedback about HOW the person does their job is collected from multiple sources (normally their manager[s], colleagues, direct reports and customers). A feedback report is then produced that allows the participant to compare their view of themselves with the feedback from others. The majority of programmes will allow this to be an anonymous process (so that comment can be honest).

2. What should you expect from the latest generation of 360 tools?
Early iterations consisted of internally driven, generic, paper based questionnaires that were manually processed and thus prone to error, sometimes causing those participating to distrust the process. Today, the best 360 degree feedback tools are:

Fully automated - They use a rigorously tested online system that guarantees the accuracy, quality and confidentiality of the whole process.

Proven Questionnaires – They use questions that are valid and have a sound theoretical foundation, measuring the things that differentiate high performing managers from the rest.

Flexible - Enabling all aspects of branding, process implementation, client support, design, development and questionnaire / report formats to be easily adjusted to meet the client's needs.

User friendly - Today's feedback reports must be easily interpreted yet comprehensive; no longer is it acceptable to provide reports containing cryptic data that appear confusing, overwhelming and require an analyst to decipher! Feedback reports should be clear, concise, understandable and easy to interpret.

3. Where can 360 degree feedback tools add value?
360s are viewed as critical components in a wide range of management development interventions. Below are some of the most common applications where 360s are used to add real value:

Performance Coaching - Used at the beginning of a coaching relationship, a 360 degree feedback report can be a powerful 'accelerator' and 'alignment' tool. By clustering and prioritising any undesirable feedback results the subject and coach can quickly gain a clear picture of where their coaching sessions should focus, ensuring key development issues are recognised and addressed. This approach to performance coaching ensures a needs driven focus based on valid, factual, accurate behavioural information.

Personal Development - Used as part of a 'life coaching' programme or as an annual development tool, 360 feedback can be used to provide genuine insight into an individual's working style across a spectrum of leadership and management behaviours and into how their 'personal brand' is perceived. The feedback report can be used to provide clarity of direction for future personal development and career planning. We are also starting to see a trend for using 360s to supplement and provide qualitative evidence in CVs!

Performance Management - A common trend is to use 360 feedback to provide an 'all round view' of performance as part of the appraisal process. The feedback is used by line managers to inform appraisal ratings and contribute to the development discussion. Used in this way, the tool can also act as a management strength benchmark, as well as highlighting individual personal strengths and problem areas.

Development Programmes - Used at the beginning of a leadership or management development programme, 360 degree feedback tools can be used to:

Inform (or determine) programme content - The feedback data from a group of people can be combined into a Group Summary Report that provides an aggregated view of the group's strengths and key development areas. Using 360s in this way enables programme designers to effectively tailor their programme content to meet specific identified needs.

Individual alignment - Providing programme participants with feedback against what is expected of them in their role and then supporting them to convert their lower ratings into a meaningful personal development plan for the programme is a great way of making the programme 'real' for them and ensuring that they start their development journey with a clear picture of what success from the programme will look like for them.

Talent Management - Whilst 360 degree feedback provides insight into a manager's past and current behaviour, when the framework of questions used includes those attributes and qualities needed to work at more senior levels they can also acts an an indicator of future performance and growth potential. 360 feedback can be a powerful component within a talent management programme and is often used to:

- Identify those individuals who have the potential to operate at the next level.
- Highlight how ability and potential can be developed.
- Act as a progress measure.
- Provide evidence based data for any prospective 'chessboard' talent management process.

Team Feedback - Just as an individual 360 provides a snapshot of how the participant is seen by those they work with, a team 360 feedback report collects feedback from groups of stakeholders from across the organisation. There are tailored survey that can provide excellent feedback for use in team development sessions and can be used to help teams gain clarity of purpose and direction, understanding the expectations of stakeholders and providing a clear picture of a team's strengths and weaknesses.

To find out more about how Lumus™ 360 Degree feedback tools can support your development intervention, visit the Complete Trainer 360 resources or for bespoke solutions email davidcooper@lumus.com

What makes you special?

When it comes to being innovative, there are many training companies out there who claim that their programmes are unique. And, I fully believe it! No other programme on the planet will have quite the same content, quite the same presenter, and certainly not the same audience.

So what is a genuine ‘unique selling point’ for a training programme, and how do you go about making this distinction?

This was a challenge I discussed recently with John Giblin, Director of a company called Reach Another Level. His team have spent the last 18 months developing performance improvement programmes based on years of training and development experience. They run residential leadership programmes, experiential team development days (such as Tall Ship sailing events), and open programmes based on accelerating performance improvement in the workplace. Two of these programmes, The Big Picture and The £100,000 Crunch Buster Challenge, seem pretty unique in content, delivery and concept.

I looked at the descriptions on the website, and then used some search terms to see if I could find anything similar. I failed after the first ten pages of Google results. But, if you searched very specifically for these programme titles, you’d only find Reach Another Level, a company whose name matches one of the programme descriptions, and many other inappropriate references.

Switch it round. Looking at the audience for these programmes, the market is the same as for more familiar training programmes, but the challenge is to educate the audience into knowing that these solutions are going to be something they will find genuinely beneficial. That may seem like the challenge everyone faces, but when you take a product such as the forerunner to MP3 players, the Sony Walkman, until they invented it, we didn’t know we needed it!

But to return to marketing, the key is in education. Identify the right target audience; inform and explain your key differences; highlight the benefits that make your product or service stand way ahead of the competition. There’s the challenge – communicating what may be a new concept to an audience who are tired of words like ‘innovative’, ‘unique’ and ‘creative’. Don’t get too clever, and don’t alienate your audience by baffling them with concepts that they just can’t grasp quickly enough.

In this highly competitive world - one which the learning and development industry may find particularly squeezed by the global economy – standing out from the crowd is more important than ever.

Just because you think you are special, does not mean the client will think so. Think like the client, and you stand a better chance of really selling your USP.

Please add your comments - I'd love to hear what you think makes YOU special (or your products, of course!)

The 10 strategy tenets for developing a customer-driven workforce

The 10 strategy tenets for developing a customer-driven workforce by Stephanie Edwards

Developing a customer-driven workforce is one of the key roles of customer service leaders and managers - but how can they successfully achieve this? In the first article in a new series exploring best practice customer service, Stephanie Edwards starts with a strategic look at the topic, outlining the 10 components of customer-centricity.

Turning a customer service strategy into reality is a key challenge for organisations. Today, most senior managers realise that customer service is the competitive strategic weapon but achieving this is sometimes a major challenge. Organisations are their people, and developing a customer-driven workforce has to be the key role of customer service leaders and managers… so how can they do this?

Peter Drucker famously said: “The purpose of business is to create and keep customers,” so every business needs to organise its service delivery system around the needs of its customers. This means firstly designing a customer service strategy that will put customers at the heart of your business. Senior managers need to ask themselves, “Are we doing everything we can to create the best possible experience for our customers?” Perhaps some senior managers assume that because their marketing departments communicate that the organisation’s service delivery “exceeds customer expectations,” that they actually do. I call this corporate arrogance! It is suicidal for businesses.

Your people are the ones to leave a first impression - and a lasting impression - on your customers. They also intimately understand customers’ frustrations and they often know how issues can be resolved, but are not empowered to make the necessary changes.

In the UK we are now predominantly a service economy, so we increasingly need high performance people to keep our customers loyal. Poor customer service is costing UK business’s £15.3bn per year as customers defect! Companies that increase customer interaction investments during a recession can improve profit margins, sales and market share over complacent competitors. It is critical for organisations to retain every customer and maximise their lifetime value.

Institute of Customer Service research shows that organisations with a reputation for service excellence have on average a 24% higher net profit margin than same-sector rivals who do not have the same standing – and they can achieve up to 71% more profit per employee. Are businesses listening?

Let’s assume there are still many organisations out there that still do not know how to establish a strong customer base, so what do they have to do? Lets get customer-centric and here are my ten key components, tried and tested, which will help organisations get started.

Components of customer-centricity
1. Customer insight – Get to know your customers and understand what they expect from you. How many organisations conduct mystery shopper activities for themselves? Where they do it can be scary but enlightening. Get to know your internal customers too - your workforce. Customer service managers need to focus on all their customers consistently and there are many ways of gathering customer intelligence. This does not mean the odd customer satisfaction survey, which I am personally not in favour of; not because most organisations disregard the feedback or do not interpret them properly, but because many organisations create them with a primary intention of achieving good results! They sometimes only ask the questions that will highlight their good practices.

Also, where satisfaction surveys are concerned doesn’t the customer experience depend a lot on customer expectations in the first place? Easyjet might score highly because we have low expectations, but we might score British Airways lower because we have high expectations. Organisations need more reliable methods of evaluating the customer experience and they need their people to make this happen. I really believe that before you decide what your customer service strategy should be you need to talk to your customers and your people, your internal customers, before you put pen to paper.

I remember one such company that impressed me which has now been taken over. Portman Building Society’s top executives travelled the length and breadth of the country to speak to their customers and their staff to identify what was important to them and what needed to be in place to satisfy all their requirements. When they analysed all the information they developed their customer service strategy, created new service standards and then went back on the road to communicate their new vision to employees and customers alike. Absolutely the right way to go which is why they proved to be a great acquisition.

2. Create the service vision or service personality – This is an identifiable set of service characteristics that define how an organisation service proposition is different from that of its competitors. Some organisations have their own credo, others have a service promise or a customer charter but whatever method you have of communicating your service standards to your customers it is important to make sure those promises are achievable and shared by all teams in the organisation.

3. Develop a customer service strategy - This determines the overall direction of the organisation, and, in particular, how the organisation will go about delivering customer service excellence.This is a high level plan that communicates to everyone involved with the organisation how it will develop relationships with its customers, in order to maximise customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, and achieve business success. It is commonly used to prevent non-aligned and disjointed activities between departments and drives everyone towards the same service goals. It includes a service/operational plan to ensure the strategic objectives are met and this should be shared with employees as everyone is going on the same journey. Communication is key; if you do not keep your people informed, rumours and gossip spread fast which can lead to negativity and once embedded it is hard to eliminate.

4. Build an appropriate customer service framework - A learning and development framework will help identify how the organisation is going to go about delivering service excellence. Reward and recognition, celebrating success are key motivators for employees so use them to deliver your service strategy. Customer service performance will improve when organisations provide support through valued reward and recognition systems. This level of recognition results in higher levels of employee satisfaction which translates into better customer service for your customers.

5. Deploy executive service leaders and managers who will become the organisation’s service champions - Service leaders and managers can make or break an organisation’s values; a leader who successfully creates a customer-focused culture will have a huge impact on business success through employee retention and customer loyalty. Ensure that your leaders and managers have the right skills, dedication and passionate about service excellence, customer focused and are results-driven. Leaders should posses a strong business acumen, be strategic, but lead by example, inspiring trust and embedding a no-blame culture within the organisation. Critically, they must encourage positive teamwork.

6. Recruit high-performance, intelligent and well-motivated people with a 'can-do attitude' - You want people with a customer-focused mindset. Once in place, develop their knowledge and skills for delivering service excellence against competencies that are customer focused – good communication skills, tolerance, empathy, good judgement and the ability to interpret service issues and respond appropriately according to the organisations rules.

7. Create innovative products and services with the support of all your people - Inspire your organisation to develop a culture of continuous improvement and innovation for the benefit of your customers. Employee suggestion schemes have helped many organisations implement change which has improved service delivery for customers but even those organisations that have the answers today cannot assume they know what their customers will want tomorrow. Customer’s expectations have become demands and successful organisations will already be anticipating customer’s demands tomorrow to stay ahead of the competition.

8. Design and implement customer-centric processes that make purchasing easy for customers - Processes should be seamless, designed from the customers viewpoint and be consistently reviewed to make transactions simple and stress free. This includes making it easy for customers to complain, remember complainants are your most loyal ambassadors if their complaints are handled professionally. Organisations seldom achieve competitive advantage through their technology and processes alone; it may add value but only if there is a parallel investment in their people who have to work with the technology to assist customers.

9. Create performance metrics so that the organisation can routinely and accurately assess its effectiveness for customers - Use appropriate tools, proven methods, for measuring your customer satisfaction, remember that customer service as a whole includes a wide range of specific service characteristics and there are many touch points where customer transactions take place. It is important to check on customers` perceptions of your service levels at each of these touch points and compare the results with what actually takes place. In other words, identifying your gaps!

10. Manage customer relationships - Products and service alone will not develop relationships with customers. The organisation must deliver something of value to ensure loyalty. Loyalty is created when you provide a level of service that exceeds expectations and which delights your customers. Managing customer relationships is about establishing, maintaining and enhancing relationships with customers for mutual benefit. This takes us back to the beginning, to learning more and more about our customers in order to deliver what they expect. If your people can be encouraged, not only to deliver the promise, but also to go the extra mile, this goes a long way towards sustaining a fantastic relationship with your customers. You will reap the rewards in loyalty, increased reputation and business success. I must emphasise at this point that although CRM is a term given to the management of customer relationships in high volume consumer services its prime objective is to collect data from different departments to enable the tracking and analysis of customer’s transactions and trends. Although particularly valuable it does not replace the personal touch.

By successfully implementing all these components you will begin to create a customer-focused culture. There is no quick fix, but eventually you will influence the behaviours of all your people so that when new recruits join the organisation the service culture dictates: “This is the way we do things around here”. The customer determines what Best Practice is and they expect the highest possible service, the most innovative products at the right price and they want them now.

To achieve service excellence organisations must make excellent service a priority and ensure that their service leaders and customer service managers posses the necessary skills to support all customer facing teams, whether front-of-house or back office; they should all interact in a carefully designed way to ensure that the customer has a fantastic experience with your organisation.

It is no longer appropriate to simply focus on product and/or services. Instead, organisations must truly understand the emotional interactions between their team leaders and mangers, employees and customers, because this is what determines whether an organisation achieves business success or not.

In the second part of this series, Stephanie will discuss the first step in realising this customer strategy - developing a customer-centric leader. Look out for this feature next month.

Stephanie Edwards is managing director of Customer 1st International, and Customer 1st Learning. You can buy her excellent customer services books from The Complete Trainer:

Best Practice Guide for Customer Service Managers
Best Practice Guide for Customer Service