These guidelines by Al Diamond for offering your customers world-class service speak for themselves.
1. Do things right ? every time. Of course, everyone tries to process items correctly. Why do we need to be so absolute in this commandment? When Agency Consulting Group, Inc. analyzes an agency’s operations, we inevitably find that simple errors come at a heavy cost in time, money, and customer satisfaction. One mistake made today might cost the time and effort of a CSR, accounting department, and a producer three months from now to sort out and correct. The answer: Develop a zero tolerance for errors.
Will mistakes be made? Of course! However, your agency must make every effort to remedy system or training issues that permit mistakes. A zero tolerance for errors protects the client by providing the fastest and most efficient service, and saves the agency countless hours of analysis and correction. Although this commandment doesn’t require checking all transactions, you should make quality control audits a part of each manager’s responsibilities. A random monthly sampling of transactions on every employee will easily highlight where lack of training is generating errors.
2. Turn customer problems into opportunities to provide the highest grade of service possible and create “customers for life.” The complaint about disloyal customers moving for a few dollars in premium becomes moot when your agency has shown its added value and service differentiation. The best opportunity to reflect this value is when a customer has a problem. Actively seek customer problems and attack them in a way that will thrill the customer with your response. Complaints aren’t bad — they provide the opportunities on which to build heroic service.
3. Create service legends. A customer service representative drops off an ID card to a client at a local auto dealership; an agent supports an active claim by going onsite; an agency employee, sensitive to the needs and restrictions of a new mother, arranges to have forms for signature delivered instead of requiring the client to drive to the agency. These all provide examples of the “thrilling” ways that agents have helped make life a little easier for customers.
Clients only talk about their insurance agent when they’re complaining, or when they’ve had a positive experience that’s so extraordinary and unexpected that they feel they must share it. It’s wise to provide an incentive bonus pool that awards serious dollars to an employee who has “thrilled” a customer during the previous month. If none can be documented, the money goes unspent. If bonus dollars are left in this budget at the end of the year, the agency can consider itself a failure: You didn’t “thrill” enough customers.
4. Treat every customer as you’d like to be treated. Nobody ever complains about being treated too well. With the notable exception of abusive clients, every agency staff member should treat every customer exactly as the employee dreams of being treated by a service company. “Do unto others … ” truly applies here. If many of us were to hear ourselves “telling” a customer what they’ll “have” to do, our demeanor would appall us. Although you and your staff hold your jobs at the customer’s pleasure, in the heat of the working day, you might not see yourself treating them as you’d want to be treated yourself.
Even (or especially) when your customer is stressed, your job is to treat them as nicely as you would your own grandmother. The solution: Police each other in service teams. If any staff member hears customers being treated in a way that might be interpreted as negative, it’s their responsibility to bring this behavior to the attention of the person making the mistake.
5. Use continuous improvement to ask more questions. The best agents are grateful for their strengths, but are never satisfied with them. They (and all of their employees) constantly seek better ways of doing things. If they can get transactional filing to work, fine; they then start investigating optical scanning as the next step toward excellent service. Keep asking yourself, “How can we make this better?” Since there’s no perfect system, you can never leave well enough alone.
6. Remember, the customer’s perception is reality. If they think you blew it, you blew it! Do you ever find yourself arguing with a customer about their incorrect perception of a situation? If so, you’ve put yourself into a “lose/lose” scenario: If the customer wins, you lose, and if you win, you lose anyway because the customer doesn’t like losing. The best way to deal with this type of problem is to apologize and ask how you can make things right (even if you did nothing wrong in the first place). This action yields the battle to the customer, but does so in a way that permits them to forgive you and to explain how the situation can be remedied — which often involves re-explaining the events in different terms).
7. Guarantee your service ? unconditionally. If something isn’t right, apologize, fix it, and prevent it from happening again. After all, you guarantee your work anyway — it’s called E&O insurance. If you deny a mistake for fear of a lawsuit, you might well end up getting sued anyway, and lose the customer (including the stories they’ll tell about you for the next 10 years) as well. On the other hand, taking blame when it’s due, assuaging your customer’s concerns, and fixing the problem might “thrill” the customer (see #3 above).
8. Make work fun. I guarantee that employees who enjoy their work will perform better, becoming more productive, more creative, and more efficient. That doesn’t mean that you never have a bad moment (or a bad day), but you can certainly differentiate between employees who enjoy their job and those who drag into work, can’t wait to leave, and whose best friend is the wall clock for breaks and lunch hours. Some employees are simply in the wrong place: They realized too late that they don’t enjoy customer contact, and they’re stuck in their career. However, why should you be stuck in their career? Your only mistake was to hire them with that type of attitude.
Although “career adjustment” might be a negative term, some employees who have left by that route have eventually thanked the agency owner for the crisis that moved them from a job they hated to another that they enjoyed. Other employees need some motivational efforts, including a break from the routine every once in a while (i.e. “Surprise, you have tomorrow off!”), contests that put some fun back into work, and department or agency-wide events once a month that relieve tension and give employees something in which to look forward (picnics, pot-luck lunches, speakers, etc.). One agency even brought in a physical therapist for anyone desiring a midday massage.
9. Be proud of your agency ? but never satisfied. This ties in with Commandment # 5 (Continuous Improvement), but refers primarily to your attitude toward yourself, your staff, the agency, the industry, etc. “Stinkin’ thinking” has brought down more agents than bad business ever did. Whether you have the best agency in the country, the city, or on the block, be proud of what you and your staff have accomplished, not upset with your deficiencies. Although you don’t want to put on rose-colored glasses and call a jackass a thoroughbred, almost every agency we’ve encountered had many strengths that deserved pride. Most overlooked their strengths because they concentrated on their weaknesses. Unfortunately, the self-fulfilling prophecy becomes real. If you think of yourself and your agency as a failure, you’ll become one (even if you’re outwardly successful).
10. Don’t forget that to your customers ? your people are the agency and the agency is the company. Never let your staff say “them and us” to a customer when referring to other people, departments, or management of the agency. To the person on the other end of the line, the staff member is the agency. If they blame claims, customer service, accounting, or management for a deficiency or problem, they weaken the agency with respect to the customer.
Similarly, your agency is the company to your customers. Even though the company, not the agency, has caused delays and made mistakes, you can’t pass the buck in the eyes of the customer whose transaction is delayed or wrong. In many cases, they’ll think (even if they rarely say) that if you have to fight the company for something as simple as accuracy and timeliness, maybe they have the wrong company and the wrong agent. After all, you’re the one who placed the customer with that company because you believed that it was the best for them!