By Alastair Kight, Managing Director of GRITIT, the UK?s leading winter risk management specialists
Exceptional customer service is a badge that everyone wants to wear, but few people get right. In my opinion, it isn?t difficult to provide a service that customers find exceptional. The answer is easy ? put your customers at the heart of everything you do.
Satisfied customers are the Holy Grail for any business. With high levels of support, customer churn is minimised and existing customers not only buy more from you, they recommend you to others.
The service we provide (gritting and snow clearance) is critical as it keeps organisations operating in the worst weather but, by its nature, is delivered in the toughest conditions. Yet, last winter, our annual end-of-season survey of clients revealed 99.2% satisfaction with the service they received.
This satisfaction led to us being listed as the 37th fastest growing business in the Sunday Times Virgin Fast Track 100 in December 2011, on the back of an 83% increase in sales.
The secret is simple ? build your business around your customers? requirements and continually listen to them so you understand the challenges they face and can respond with innovative ideas to help them.
After happy customers, your second biggest asset is your staff. Having motivated and passionate people representing your business will mean they?re always doing the best job they can for you and your customers and they?ll often go the extra mile.
We select everyone we work with based on their attitude, skills and knowledge (ASK) ? in that order. Having a ?can do? attitude is essential for us. We believe it?s easier to teach people the skills needed for the job, than it is to change a person?s work ethic and the team continually prove to us that this is the best approach.
We ask our teams to go out in the middle of the night during the coldest times of the year, when most people are warm in bed. Yet every member of the GRITIT team will happily tell you they love what they do and this passion means the job is delivered to our customers? satisfaction every time.
Our staff go above and beyond the call of duty for our customers. Last winter, one of our guys was clearing snow from walkways in the middle of a freezing night and noticed that someone had piled snow up against a fire escape door as a prank, preventing it from being opened. It wasn?t part of the contract to clear snow from that part of the site but his conscience couldn?t let him leave it as it was, so he spent additional time clearing it, much to the customer?s delight.
It?s not just customer-facing staff who should be relied on to react to customers? needs, everyone in the business should be focused on it. There needs to be an internal culture which promotes and rewards innovative thinking.
It?s also vital to have robust systems and processes in place, which enable every member of the team to do the best job whilst being as flexible as possible with customer needs. As technology improves, the possibilities become endless ? so never again should staff need to say ?computer says no?.
We?ve invested heavily in proprietary software and have integrated additional systems to provide us with fully customised technology for our specific needs. In order to protect our customers from injury claims, our systems have been developed to automatically activate our service process once ground temperatures are forecast to drop to zero or below. This means it?s not an arbitrary decision to provide gritting and snow clearance, it?s based on accurate weather data.
The whole process is automated, so weather data is processed, jobs are dispatched to the teams based in areas where service is required, the customers are alerted, our vehicles are tracked, the team then log when the service has been delivered and a communication is sent to the customer.
During an average winter we?ll conduct more than 100,000 service visits and, because of our robust systems, 99.98% are completed incident-free.
We are extremely proud of the partnership we have with our customers and it?s all down to putting them at the centre of everything we do. And of course it?s not all about the bottom line; there is nothing more satisfying for you and your staff than a customer being delighted with the work you?ve done.
With the recession leaving a legacy of consumers and businesses demanding more value for their money, customer service has never been more important. Those who will thrive will not just make customer service one of the things they do, they will ensure their service delivery is based entirely around the customer.
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