Brainstorm for better service
SS&G originally created a Super Service Group as a way to reinforce superior customer service, but it has since evolved into a brainstorming group that initiates tactics for improving customer service.
“Some tactics that we come up with [are ideas] that we’ve seen other places that we think we should implement in our office,” Shamis says. “Hopefully, people are so aware of it that it becomes something they’ll look for in the way they deal with other people.”
Just like the training session will flip on their attention to customer service, involving them in a group like this will give them an outlet to actually share their observations and ideas.
Your service group will inevitably draw from other service factors in your culture, such as training and listening to customer feedback. Because of that overlap, the committee can’t just be tacked together as an afterthought.
“It only works if you culturally want to do it and understand that’s what you want to do,” Shamis says.
Include employees from all of your departments in your service group, both to get a range of input from people who connect with customers in different ways and to maintain a single vision of service throughout the entire company.
“We tried to get representatives from all over the organization — people who touch clients in different ways in different offices, so we can try and be consistent wherever we go within the organization,” Shamis says.
One of the Super Service Group’s big ideas was a lobby overhaul. Committee members equipped the waiting areas with flat-screen TVs, ready with business channels for adults and video game hookups for kids.
Other everyday tactics seem more like common courtesy and don’t require such a shove to implement. These surface in the employee handbook as telephone and e-mail protocol.
“Most of it is really just the attention to (customers): returning phone calls on a timely basis, returning e-mails on a timely basis, checking your voice mails if you’re not going to be available,” Shamis says. “Let them know you’re going to be out of town on vacation and not returning e-mails and give them an option.
“There’s nothing worse than calling somebody’s office and asking for Gary Shamis when the receptionist knows that he may not even be there and they put you right into voice mail. What we attempt to do is say, ‘Well, Gary’s not there, can somebody else help you? If not, would you like his voice mail?’”
