The world has just ended Customer Service Week* and I participated in some fabulous activities, both with my work team and also on a larger scale. We had some really fun activities which we designed to incent ourselves to provide better customer service for the week. We held some friendly competitions to try and out-do our normal service levels and made it fun with some prizes, lots of food and a few games for team building. On a national level, we participated in HDI's Customer Service Week webinars (www.thinkhdi.com/csweek) and heard from some absolutely great speakers via five webinars.
As we progressed through our week, we selected random customers (we provide internal IT Support) and delivered small gifts and thank you cards to them. The feedback was great.
Then, during one of the webinars we attended, the speaker Phil Gerbyshak (http://makeitgreat.typepad.com) shared a great idea - to write a thank you note and make a call to one of your customers daily or weekly.
That made us stop aand think. It takes 5 minutes to handwrite a note and send it and about 5 minutes to make a call. It's not to sell them anything, merely to express your thanks for being your customer. If you do this weekly, you will make a more personal connection with approximately 100 of your customers (50 via email and 50 via phone - you'll miss a few weeks due to sick or vacation - trust me) and that is a heck of a way to reach out. If you can do this daily, you will reach over 500 of them!
This sounds like a lot of work, but it takes 10 minutes a day. If you have several people of your team that have the "giddy-up" to help out and you share the work, it truly can be just a few minutes of your week. This takes our random "gift and thank you card" winners for this week and excellerates it to a new level. This is taking Customer Service Week and making it Customer Service Year!
We are going to try this out at work, I'll let you know how it goes.
Thanks for reading,
Brandon
*Some trivia - Customer Service Week (or CSW as it is known on the inside) was officially declared a nationally recognized event by Congress and President George H. W. Bush in 1992.
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1 comment:
You're right - why isn't it customer service YEAR? I think if it were, and we thought of how we'd respond if customers were sitting right next to us, most everyone would choose to provide great customer service.
Good luck on the follow-ups. I look forward to reading more!
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