Back in October, we posted an article called Every Week IS National Customer Service Week, in which we brainstormed five reasons to celebrate customer service in addition to the five reasons that the Customer Service Group already suggests for Customer Service Week.
Our five reasons included:
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Show, don't tell customers how committed you are to their satisfaction.
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Listen to your customers -- be they in person, on the phone, online or twittering -- and take action upon their complaints and suggestions.
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Create a customer-centric culture from the top down.
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Incentivise frontline reps all year long, not just the first full week in October.
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Employ a CRM solution that not only manages Sales Force Automation (SFA) but also the largest segment and most important part of customer relationship management, Customer Service and Support (CS&S).
Those suggestions were in addition to the five suggestions by the CS Group:
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Boost morale, motivation and teamwork.
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Reward frontline reps for the important work they do all year long.
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Raise company-wide awareness of the importance of customer service.
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Thank other departments for their support.
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Let customers know about your commitment to customer satisfaction.
Some great suggestions for sure, but why is it so important to keep them in mind all year long? Because customer service is so important to the bottom line that it shouldn’t just be celebrated for one week a year. If a company identified any strategy that was so critical to their success or survival, would it make sense to only promote that strategy once a year? Of course not!
In Big Reasons To Improve Your Customer Service In A Recession, Niccolina Soto explains the correlation between customer service and sustainable growth:
"Customer loyalty is a major contributor to sustainable profit growth. To achieve success, you must make superior service second nature of your organization. A seamless integration of all components in the service-profit chain – employee satisfaction, value creation, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and profit and growth – links all the critical dynamics of top customer service."
Customer Service Week falls this year on October 5-9, 2009. If companies think they’re going to wait until then to promote some of these valuable suggestions, they may just find that they’re a bit too late to save the sinking ship. Now would be a great time to highlight customer service week on business calendars around the nation, and keep it there all year long!
