Customer service counts in all industries more than ever. Bad experiences get shared across networks fairly quickly and poor customer service can significantly decrease your market share and profitability even if your product is superior to those of your competitors. Focus your attention on your clients, hire and train all staff with a customer-centric approach in mind as it will …
Include people and lead together
One can never be too informed. Get as much valuable and relevant information as you can so that you can act on that information, make decisions and lead people. The best way to do this is to actually include people and ask for their input, their ideas and suggestions. Include people and lead together.
Can’t win them all
While you may have the best intentions in mind and are able to demonstrate your highest levels of quality, at times, some people may still not be completely satisfied. I say this not to suggest that you should give up on improving your services and products or that you should give up on trying to reach those individuals and address …
Social networks: separate personal from business
If you happen to be the person responsible for your organization’s social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube…) make sure you make a clear distinction between those official, business accounts and your own personal accounts. As we have seen time after time, this is a very simple mistake to make which can have detrimental effects for both you and your brand.
Introduce yourself and meet people
As you join a new team it is crucial to introduce yourself and meet people in this new organization (both within and outside your immediate team and responsibilities). While it is important to familiarize yourself with policies, guidelines and operational structure it is equally important to put names and faces together and by doing so build familiarity and trust.
Enable people to contribute
As you work with people from different departments, divisions, even different companies you may come to realize that their work may be based on varying levels of quality and expectations. Before getting upset or immediately escalating to their supervisors please try to understand the full picture as to what they may be dealing with. They could be severely understaffed, overworked …
Engage with your industry
Engage with your colleagues, profession and industry by attending seminars, conferences and meetups, both local and global. Learn from others who are wiser or more experienced; learn from those who have done it successfully; learn from those who are a bit further along than you on this journey. Additionally, and equally as important, don’t forget to share what you know …
Respect employees’ personal time
Respect your employees personal time. Please do your best not to “bother” your staff (except in rare, emergency situations of course) outside their work hours with work related questions and responsibility. If you find yourself consistently contacting people outside work hours chances are that there’s a big problem at play. You may have “bottlenecks” within your operations and you should …
Be honest with your service providers
Please be honest with your service providers. No matter what happened to a particular piece of equipment or a product we need to have as many facts as possible up front in order to provide adequate services and support. There’s no reason to be ashamed or embarrassed as chances are that your story is not the worst we have heard …
How to change bad habits
How to change bad habits? Well, we all have them and to begin the change we must first accept that they exist. Once we are aware of specific bad habits, we need to begin the process to change them and replace them with better habits (not with another bad habit which happens frequently). This process in it’s simplest form looks …