I don't think there is anyone anywhere who hasn't had both a mind-blowing customer service experience and a horrible service experience. It seems that everywhere you go in The Bahamas, people are complaining about the level of service they receive. It's almost as if a person can smile and greet you and it will be considered blow-away service in comparison to the poor attitudes, lack of attention, lack of know-how and lack of concern customers experience from day to day in both public and private sectors.

As a hospitality and soft skills corporate trainer, I've designed and facilitated more customer service sessions over the years than I can count, and always get the same feedback: 'this training is so needed around here'. As a business and human resource consultant, however, I tend to look at customer service from a different angle, and design my training and consultancy that way. Service is more than just being able to smile and say all the right catch phrases.  Customer service is about creating experiences - beginning from the inside out of a company and its team.

I like to define customer service as what a customer experiences as they contemplate and complete a transaction for a product or service. My service philosophy is that service begins long before a customer makes a buying decision. Service begins by what you do internally as a business owner and leader to prepare to serve customers. Here are a few critical activities a business leader should do before delivering customer service and expecting your team to do the same.

1. Determine your customer service philosophy and share it with staff. As a business owner, you should be able to answer yes to all the following questions:

o Do you have a company vision and mission?
o Do you have company core values?
o Do you have a customer service vision or underlying belief about what customer service means to you?
o Do you have core values and standards to govern how you deliver service?

I find business leaders want their teams to execute service efficiently but have not clearly articulated what that actually means. Do you just want me to be friendly? Do you want me to go above and beyond? Do you want me to break the rules to satisfy a customer? Do you want me to make empowered decisions to resolve customer issues? A lack of vision in this regard can only prove frustrating for staff and result in inconsistent or nonexistent service delivery.

2. Create customer service policies and procedures that reflect your philosophy
Out of your customer service vision and belief should come your customer service policies and procedures which determine the parameters within which service is delivered to customers. This deals with the how, the what and the when of service delivery; the vision deals with 'the why'. Your policies should speak to what a customer receives, what to do when a customer is not satisfied and whether or not you will follow up after the transaction.

3. Train your team on the service philosophy, policies and procedures.
One of the craziest things I see as a consultant and trainer is the lofty expectations that management has of a team that has no clue about how management wants service to be in the organization and criticizes the team for not performing to these unspoken, unclear standards. It should sound crazy to you too.

Staff must be trained consistently on service expectations and standards at all levels of the organization. What is shocking to me is when you complain at an establishment and the manager's attitude is worse than the employee's. There is no concern that a customer is dissatisfied and cares enough to tell you about it. Everyone has to support the service standards - with internal and external customers.

4. Decide how you will reward the delivery of exemplary customer service.
Yes, we all understand that people should be grateful to have a job and get a paycheck, but people are also human beings, and all human beings love to feel important, special, valued and appreciated. People also want to feel that they belong to a cause they can believe in. If you develop a service mindset and culture throughout your organization and team, you get buy-in and consistent, quality service. If the team is helping you reach your financial goals by increased sales and impressive customer feedback and ultimately, customer loyalty, shouldn't everyone share in those rewards? As business leaders, you must figure out how giving great service will be rewarded both at the individual and team levels.

5. Reinforce the service message often. This step is very important to achieving customer service success. The service message, expectations, standards and behaviors must be reinforced as often as is practically possible, especially if these requirements are new to your team. This must be reinforced so people will not go back to old behaviors and the 'this is how we always did it', 'this is how we used to do it' mentality. Not only should the new behaviors be reinforced, they should also be modeled by the entire organization. If a standard is to greet customers as soon as they enter your doors, team members should also be greeting each other according to standard. What this does is not only cause the message and conduct to stick, it also establishes a culture of service that becomes the norm.

In part two of "When customer service fails", we will explore how culture helps and hinders exceptional customer service.

o Simmone L. Bowe, MSc. is a human resource and organization development specialist, speaker, trainer, author, and mentor who focuses on helping business leaders and professionals diagnose performance problems in their organizations and careers, navigate the changes needed to develop high performing, purpose-driven people, teams and organizations. For comments, queries and bookings, email sbowe94@gmail.com.

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