Developing Successful Customer Service Plan
Rendering the Grit in Integrity
Introduction‘I am guessing’ many of the workers at Studio Productions each have a favorite customer service story. I surmise that some parts of situations in each story were not resolved to a satisfactory conclusion. Also, workers in attempt to make the situation cost effective, found that he or she ran out of time, and had to move on to pressing job tickets (Verghis; 2007, para).
Moreover, ‘I will bet many feel a good deal of frustration’ about their jobs these days. That’s a common problem among service and support executives: You are the supposed voice of the customer. Traditionally you oversee a key area of operations, and you ‘hit regularly home runs’ on your Sales/ Service group’s performance metrics. But when big decisions are made, no one listens to you. No one seems to give a hoot. If that’s a problem you’d like to take action to solve, some group evaluations can help.
I realize this letter can only take you partway on a journey toward greater respect and influence for evaluating the customer in us all. Therefore the following is in response to the commonality aspects of ‘learning to serve each other, will evolve into better serving our customers’ (Verghis; 2007, para).
Discussion: Making it Policy
How to make others in the company able to relate to duty of customer service is to encourage others to believe in the commitment of company-wide service obligations. Commitments to each other, as well as to customers: this is the question.
Frontline personnel and managers earn the right to demand respect for their customer service support operations. CS Support organizations in ‘high technology firms and academia provide excellent benchmarks of improved customer service, efficient cyber Servicescapes, and respectable cost savings.’ For others, as has been illuminated for me, it does not take me long to find that integrity and gumption go hand in hand. To succeed, we will have made people we work with, outside our Sales/Service team, listen and take our efforts seriously (Verghis; 2007, para).
The frontline is the decision-makers for what works and what doesn't work in becoming a persuasive advocate for our customers and for our staff. For instance a recent movie/docudrama, The Guardian, features the work of the US Coast Guard. In the end notes special features, one of the real life rescue swimmers who worked in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans said something very pertinent to our situation.
As shown in this DVD special feature, the Coast Guard rescuers receive training that is from top to bottom modal. Modal is a term meaning progressive actions taken respectively while deciding what it takes to successfully save a destitute person. Training in context of knowledge, belief, and obligation, more simply, the rescue mission is made of step-by-step progressive actions to limit probability of failure. Many rescuers claim after the training the tasks of rescuing start to materialize naturally. However, failure to rescue a victim comes when one or more of the elements of rescue dynamics breaks down or is deleted.
Discussion: Knowledge, Belief, Obligation
The rescuer said that she was rushed in to Louisiana, and ‘did not know her team mates in the helicopters over New Orleans.’ She did not even have time to ‘review procedures with the pilots, flight mechanic, or ground support personnel.’ Thrown into the aftermath of multi-survivor scenario, she went through each air-to-ground rescue with unfamiliar team-mates. By using the procedure so ingrained in training of all rescue personnel in context of low probability failure, she said each element of each rescue could be carried out with confidence.’ Could this knowledge benefit SPInc in developing their new century CS paradigm? (The Guardian; 2006, para)
The US Coast Guard is a service organization with its contingency strongly believing in their obligation to serve, protect and save. The customer is I and you, in the event of helplessness to save ourselves. “Rescue swimmers often encounter survivors who are confused and scared. Their flailing arms and legs can be dangerous. [Rescues Swimmers] develop ‘Techniques’ to defend against inadvertent attacks while helping subdue victims in need of rescue” (The Guardian; 2006, para).
Though, much less dramatic, employees and customers of Studio Productions often need rescuing. Without superior customer service procedure as policy with the guard-rails learned in tough training, you the employee and your customer likely would suffer untold horrors. Why? The hope of being rescued when you are destitute is supplanted with terror that maybe the rescuer is incapable. When you see the first-hand failure of the rescue procedure, there is tension, anxiety and fear.
Internally displaced antagonized employees circulating around Studio Productions are no different from the needy dependents saved by the Coast Guard.
If we are to improve Service in the company, our jobs as managers no longer allow us the refuge of doing the front counter tasks. Rather we managers now support our frontline workers by supplying all the experience, information and knowledge they need for successful, decisive, efficient customer co-relational service. The first item on our agenda should be to hold a caucus on substantiating Customer Service Modeling: “The Customer Service Model... Customers... Strategy... Systems... People” for the new millennia (Swartzlander, Anne; 2004 para)
Studio Productions does not need simply an extra motivational event. We will have made a scalable plan to have in-house workshops that are interactive, often intense, experiential events. Group discussions will be guided in clear focus of practical, hands-on problems that frontline personnel, managers and Studio Production’s executives face every day. The stage will have been set to encourage internal support for our obligation to serve our customers fittingly:
- Tactics and insights that will make for a more effective frontline leadership
- Emphasis in ways to earn more respect from each other
- Examples of ‘When’ do we all need to be more aggressive and pound the table?
- Real influence comes from real accomplishments
- By the end of the day, a notebook filled with ways to make every aspect of Studio Productions noticeably better (Ingram, T N and Assoc; 2006, para)
Conclusion
Customer Service at Studio Productions is not a failure today; it just doesn’t work anymore in our modern multi-task business environment. In context of addressing internal customer service policy changes, I have heard some comments already making rounds in the corridors of Studio Production’s:
I am confident real-world stories and world of work real-life cases will continue to capture the mind’s eye of the entire work-force. Trusting in the frontline workers' ideas and imagination is added value, because minds are at maximum exertion at Studio Productions. I sincerely hope we all join in and have extended discussions with each other adding to our customer service knowledge base. Each worker has pertinent momentous feedback about our toughest career issues, and work-a-day customers who we toil with. Let’s take advantage of our good fortune.“Excellent. It validates some things I was thinking about. Some things I am already doing. But more importantly it inspired me about some new directions, and even some cost saving ideas.”
“How do we make it easy for us [employees] to understand concepts that may take us beyond comfort zones?”
“I want pithy presentations, loads of interactive pushy exercises, questions, and shared ideas. I feel it is needed to re-think and re-tool our present approaches and methods.”
“Very real world examples, is necessary to start communication, style and content well-targeted for this group.”
“I have written down many notes and many Personal Action Plans to share with others.”
“Reminds me of the longest running TV show in England BBC’s ‘Are you being served?’” (Verghis; 2007, para)
References
CTU (2006) Colorado Technical University Online, MKT430-0701B-03 Course Materials, retrieved February 28, 2007 from Mainframe Content Frame
Guardian, the; (2007) Walt Disney Internet Group, WDIG, A- School, intense five week training program for Coast Guard rescue swimmers, retrieved 3/07; video movies go the guardian
Hussey, Gardner, (February 28, 2007, 3:27:33 PM) Personal Selling and Customer Focus, of Studio Productions... Customers Perceptions, retrieved 3/5/07, Week 1 Live Chat Session 1 Personal Selling and Customer Focus ppt
Ingram, T N and Assoc (2006) Professional selling: a trust-based approach, 3rd Ed, Australia: Thomson South-Western
Swartzlander, Anne; (2004) Serving Internal and External Customers, 1st Ed, 2004, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ
Verghis, Phil (2007) the Verghis Group, All rights reserved, Retrieved 3/4/2007; verghisgroup workshop clid, www philverghis, the Ultimate customer Support Executive, Unleash the power of their customer Aug/2005
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