Watch Customer Service Strategy in SCM on YouTube
Hi. I'm John Tschohl.
I'd like to talk about how do we implement a service strategy in supply change management? How do we differentiate ourselves? How do we create this relationship with our customers so that we are the provider of choice?
There are so many different things that can go wrong in your industry. The real key is, what is the customer experience like? Good customer service is not going to create any loyal customers. It's not going to get customers to come back. Competition is incredible. The only way to compete is through what I call the service strategy. That's by providing this incredible customer experience. There's 4, 5 things that you should do.
Number 1, what are the policies and systems that you should change to make it easier for people to do business with you? Secondly, what are you doing to make sure that your employees are empowered so they make fast decisions? They're able to bend the rules? They understand that nothing is more important than taking care of a customer.
Third, do they use the customer's name? Do they remember the customer? Fourth, what kind of speed do you have? In your business, supply change management, speed is everything. How do you shrink dramatically the time it takes to get things done? Normally if it took 10 hours, how do I get done in 1 hour? That's called speed. Amazon has better speed, better grasp of speed, than any other company in the world. Why not become an Amazon and master speed?
Next is, we have to educate and train our staff so that every single person communicating with a customer, whether it be by email, by fax, through the internet, in person, they understand that they are dealing with the most important person in the world, your customer. Do they value the customer? If the customer calls at 11 o'clock at night, is somebody there to answer the phone? Do we have a 24 to 7 live person answering the call in 1 or 2 rings? In our supply change management do we use voice mail? Push 1, push 2, push 4 to go to hell?
If we want to create this incredible experience we got to make sure that all of our employees are skilled and trained in the art of customer service. That's where Service Quality Institute comes in. We provide the tools that change behaviors and attitudes and teach people the skills in the art of customer service. There's no magic program that you and I could use, that we could dip our employees in and all of a sudden they're going to become wonderful and customer driven for the entire life of that individual because they went through 8 hours of training. You have to have new stuff, fresh stuff, new stuff, fresh stuff. Better be new, better be fresh, and it better be at least every 4 months if you want to develop a customer driven workforce.
Thank you.
