Customer Service Zen...become really good at your job

Today was a free worldwide tele-seminar on personal branding - http://www.personalbrandingsummit.com/. Take a minute to visit the site, I am told that soon, podcasts will be posted of all 24 of the sessions.

I was able to listen to several of the speakers, among them Debbie Weil (http://www.debbieweil.com/, and Phil Gerbyshak (makeitgreat.typepad.com). My takeaway from today's speakers is that we can, should and are all branding ourselves constantly. For our work, that means that we are creating an image of ourselves in the minds of our customers.

For myself, I have worked very hard with my team (both up and down the chain) to brand ourselves as a customer focused team. This encompasses not only responding to issues that happen, but also a constant nurturing of our customers to "check in" and to communicate frequently so that they know us and trust us.

Specific things that we do are visiting them periodically (drop in or scheduled), periodic "touch base" meetings, ad hoc calls, emails and thank you cards (an idea from Phil Gerbyshak) and in general, making sure that we are more than "just someone to call when things go wrong."

The feedback over time has snowballed into something truly wonderful. I'm not sure if we are quite to the level of Raving Fans, but we feel as though we are on the right track.

Feel free to use any of these techniques and I would love to hear from you on ideas you have tried.

Thanks for reading,

Brandon

Customer Service Week? Why Not Customer Service Year?

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.