How companies can provide memorable customer experience

Their automobiles usually come with the slogan: One Man, One engine, meaning, the engineer who designed the Mercedes Benz is responsible for the experience the global customer will have.

In case of a problem, the company can identify the particular car and deal with the complaint. We may not do it like Mercedes but we can surely do the same thing in different ways. The bottom line? Be responsible to the customers’ experience at an individual level.

This is only achieved if we cultivate customer care as a culture and a duty of every employee and not just a single department of the company.

Every employee must be customer-obsessed. You can only provide the best for the people you are crazy about and even exceed their expectations.

Do not serve the customer just because they came around or you are performing your job. Go beyond the normal. Serve your customers in an exceptional way.

In simple terms, emotional intelligence requires you to treat people well. People want to speak to a real, live, responsive, responsible person who will listen and leave them satisfied.

Every business can achieve this by handling internal and external customers well and listening to their issues keenly.

When employees feel appreciated and valued and their personal issues prioritised they are be motivated to serve customers better. The opposite leads to poor service to external customers.

Managers should listen to employees’ suggestions and not put business first and staff needs last. Many will argue that you are supposed to leave your issues behind the gate when you enter your workplace.

This is impossible to do Emotional intelligence requires us to do unto others as we would wish them to do unto us.

Quality assurance refers to developing operational controls in an organisation which ensure that results match the desired outcomes. Our customer service operations must be designed to keep clients satisfied while protecting the organisation and the brand.

To ensure customer service achieves these goals, the team responsible for quality assurance must clearly define quality functions and how they apply to handling customers.

When such definitions are in place it becomes easy to define resources required to adequately fulfil the customer care mandate and ensure quality services.

Customer service is simply helping customers solve their problems. To meet this function with ease and effectiveness customer service must be reliable, knowledgeable, deliver good results and be easily accessible.

Quality assurance seeks to identify these requirements and then measures how well customer service performs. Therefore, quality assurance in customer service can be defined as a means to evaluate characteristics that make customer service satisfactory.

The quality assurance system can compare three issues: what the customer expects, what you promise, and what your customer service actually delivers.

High quality

When the delivered service matches he customers’ expectations and is a true reflection of what you promise then the quality is high.

The quality assurance system can also be used to track improvements in service delivery in the event there are gaps between the three issues mentioned earlier.

It is important to use the above system to survey regularly customers to capture their expectations and match the same against deliveries and promises.

Customers will appreciate service delivered with competence and so quality assurance must track competence which can be done through training and results.

The employees delivering customer service need to have competence derived from training that enables them to deliver services well. The system must be integrated to keep records of training and surveys on customers and evaluate the firm’s competence in delivery.

It can assign scores for completed training and competence in delivery compared to industry benchmarks. A low score will mean employees have less training or apply training in less competent measures compared to the rest of the industry.

We can address this by providing more training.

Customers want reliable and competent service delivery in easily, accessible ways. They are mainly interested in solutions to their problems.

Quality assurance must document their complaints, track actions taken to resolve the issues, and surveys on their satisfaction with the solution provided.

The quality assurance system can compare competence, reliability and delivery with the level of customer satisfaction.

The system must frequently check for discrepancies and revise evaluations to ensure that it functions well and gives suitable results.

Torosterdt works at Safaricom.