Commandment No. 7 from Shep Hyken’s Forbes article, The Ten Commandments of Superior Customer Service, is “Do What Is Necessary, Not What Is Comfortable”.
Succinctly, Hyken puts it, “If you are focused on your customer, you will do what’s right and necessary, not what’s easy.” So how does one know what’s right and necessary in the world of sales and customer service?
A recurring notion we’ve discussed in these blogs has been the idea that you should place yourself in your customers’ shoes. How would you like to be treated? Would you be happy with the wait time? How about with the ease of using your products or services? What would you want to have happen if there were a mistake? Would you be comfortable with your prices as they relate to the quality of your business’s offerings?
But these questions are broad, and the answers you will give will be general by nature. Of course you want to be treated well. Of course you want the briefest wait time. Everyone wants the products and services to be easy to use. Everyone wants the business to take care of any mistakes straight away. And who wouldn’t want the best price he can get with the maximum quality available?
Are these ideas too vague to be useful? Not necessarily, but they only serve to create goals for your business. They’re not directly actionable in and of themselves. Platitudes on their own can’t measure how well your staff is doing. So how do you learn exactly what is necessary, what might be uncomfortable to hear?
—Direct feedback. You want the opinions of the people on the street, the kinds of folks who make up your clientele. You want feedback that is simultaneously independent and opinionated, both nonpartisan and honest. And that’s the beauty of secret shoppers. They have no personal stake in how you feel, but they sure as heck want you to know how they feel. Objective people with subjective opinions: there’s no combination more authentic and more useful.
Customer surveys will get you part of the way there, but the data you generate from these will only measure the folks who are already your customers, not the potentials out there. Worse still, the only people who regularly respond to surveys are the ones who are either very happy or very angry. You can’t capture what an average experience is like that way, and the extreme experiences detailed in the surveys will only tempt you to overreact one way or the other.
You have to be able to answer those earlier questions from the point-of-view of the average person.
So let us help you design a mystery-shopping program that will help you fixate on what’s right and necessary for your business to be the healthiest it can be. Together, we’ll ensure your staff is on track to always go the extra mile, to always embrace the mindset of putting the customer first. Learn more now!
