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Serivce culture is a system of values and beliefs in an organization that reinforces the idea that
providing the customer with quality service is the principal concern of the business.
A service culture exists when you motivate the employees in your organization to take a customer-centric
approach to their regular duties and work activities. Sales and service employees put customer needs first
when presenting solutions and providing support. Other employees work behind the scenes to ensure
customers get a good product experience. Developing a service culture requires time and consistency.
Vision
The service mentality starts with a vision of what you want your company to be known for. Maybe
you want customers and prospects to rave about the knowledge of your sales and service agents or
about how helpful your agents are. You must have a vision in mind for how you want your business
to be perceived. With this as a blueprint, you can begin recruiting and training your staff to execute
this vision.
People
Your employees are one of your greatest assets. If you expect them to execute on your vision, you
must share and remind them of what it is at every turn. Don't forget that a service mindset should not
just exist where there is customer-employee or prospect-employee interaction. Encourage
departments to adopt a service mentality when it comes to interacting with each other. When
recruiting new employees, look for candidates who exemplify a commitment to superior customer
service. Make sure there is training and coaching for both new and existing employees.
Training
To deliver on service, your company must have training for your employees in place. If you don't
have the resources to hire a full-time trainer, consider purchasing online learning modules for your
employees or having a speaker come in whenever the budget allows to coach and discuss this with
your staff. Online learning modules may be a great way to assess how your staff is measuring up to
expectations. Consider options that are fun for your employees and that offer assessments and
reporting so you can review agent performance and see where deficiencies exist.
Feedback
Gathering feedback is an important component of enhancing the service your business provides.
You'll want to have a means of soliciting customer or prospect feedback so you can determine if your
business is delivering on the service goals and mission you've established. Don't neglect employee
feedback. You'll want to understand what's working and what's not within the company. Use this
information to develop your training program so you can make your business a force with which to
be reckoned.
were genuine;
desired to help me;
had the ability to act on what they knew to be true;
knew what their job was and how well they were doing; and
were confident in their ability to make a difference.
We need to ask ourselves five questions to effectively serve our internal customers (our
people) so they can deliver on the promise we share with our external customers:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
doing terrible in the delivery of customer service; more often than not, they are already
doing quite well in this area, but are looking to enhance and raise the bar on current service
levels.
Regardless, if you are looking to create a culture of service excellence or change/enhance
your current culture to a higher level of excellence, following are seven steps to allow you to
structure and guide the creation. It will start with identifying a group of people to be
responsible for leading the initiative. This Service Excellence Team (SET) should be
composed of a cross-functional, high level group of people who have a desire to lead and
make this culture a reality. In essence, they will become the conscience of the organization
in keeping the sight and focus on the end result.
This Service Excellence Team will design the following steps to be tailored to fit the
organization, educate all employees on the systems and processes, and finally
ensure execution of each step throughout the entire organization.
Step 1 Communication and Awareness
This step ensures that all employees of the organization are on the same page regarding
the service process and are kept up to date on all developments. Employees need to be
introduced to the service excellence process why it is happening and what the plan is. It is
important to establish the WIIFM (whats in it for me?) for employees to want to become
engaged and involved.
Step 2 Orientation and Training
This step leads the effort to build customer service into every training opportunity offered by
the organization. The result is a continuous focus on the customer and improving the
customer experience. It starts with the orientation of all new employees to ensure customer
service is incorporated and highlighted into the new hire process.
Step 3 Recruitment
A culture begins with the people you hire. This step involves developing a consistent
interview and selection process across the entire organization. It will include benchmarking
with service superstars already in the organization and creating an interview process that
increases the likelihood of hiring strong performers.
Step 4 Recognition and Celebration
This step focuses on recognizing employees who demonstrate the service values of the
organization. This includes formal recognition programs as well as on-the-spot recognition
opportunities. Without reinforcement of behaviors that are aligned with the service
excellence process, employees typically revert to the old way of doing things.
Step 5 Management Accountability
The number one reason that service initiatives fail to achieve their desired results is a lack
The first, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, has been transforming the hospitality
industry for 50 years (expanding from a single hotel in Toronto to 90 global properties).
Its new company-wide innovation program, BLUEWATER, equips 35,000 employees
with tools and behaviors needed to ideate, pilot, and refine guest experiences.
The second, Facebook, has innovated around the same purpose since it launched in
2004: giving people the power to share and connect. Even with a user base of nearly 1
billion people, Facebook continues to empower employees to improve upon successful
pieces of its platform, resulting in expansive changes like its News Feed and Timeline.
Throughout our field trip, we encouraged delegates to look for the stories behind the
companies theories and models, and to regard everything as stimulusfrom the
posters in Facebooks hallways (The journey is 1% finished) to the dishes of blue
candies at the Four Seasons New York (showcasing the intense level of buy-in). This
was their chance to leave the office and hear from the people who do the heavy lifting,
the foot soldiers in the innovation trenches.
Despite the differences in what these companies do, they share a set of principles
around innovation culture. Here are six key lessons that emerged during our field trip:
Know thyself
Theres no singular method to creating a culture of innovation. Establishing one, and
making it stick, depends on understanding the climate. How will the firm react during
periods of experimentation? Which structures, behaviors, goals, and people must be in
place to unlock innovation? And which, if positioned improperly, would create discord?
To be clear, this isnt about avoiding discomfort. For Four Seasons, giving every
employee, from bartenders to line cooks, the power to suggest new ideas was a scary
proposition. Four Seasons hotels are organized around each propertys general
manager, and its culture is risk-averse (its well-to-do clientele relies on a flawless
customer experience). But Four Seasons realized that the core of its culture was service
and that employees who dealt with guests every day were on the frontlines of the
customer-service experience. So BLUEWATER sources and pilots ideas through
general managers, while also soliciting fresh solutions from elsewhere within the
company.
Consider, on the other hand, the three tenets of Facebook: 1) Move fast and break
things; (2) What would you do if you werent afraid?; and (3) Put people at the center of
things. While suited to the upstart culture of Facebook, these concepts would never
work at Four Seasons, where moving fast and breaking things is very much not what
guests hope for. The structured way of life at the Four Seasons would conflict with a
culture built around organic flexibility at Facebook. We dont belabor, we dont debate,
we move, said Eric Berman, who, as a client partner at Facebook, helps brands craft
social strategy. To harness this energy, Berman told us, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a list
of non-goals. These restraints are necessary to guide a company driven by action.
Just do it
You want to move quickly when innovating. Moving too slowly can be the death knell of
new ideas. At Facebook and Four Seasons, its not pure speed thats key, though. Its
the speed that comes from being decisive and having vision.
For Four Seasons, this principle is expressed in identifying just do it ideasnobrainers that can be executed quickly and without excessive supervisionas opposed
to ideas that require more input. It also means piloting certain concepts at targeted
properties, then fanning them out once theyre a proven success. Fifteen-minute room
service was born at the Four Seasons in Boston and soon adopted by properties
worldwide.
At Facebook experimentation and iteration fuel innovations engine. Every change to
Facebooks platform is beta tested; the agents of change are empowered to drive ideas
forward. This orientation requires relinquishing a bit of control. When Facebook wanted
to translate its platform into multiple languages, engineers created an app that let users
translate the site themselves (and vote on which translation was most accurate). In less
than 24 hours, more than 90 percent of the site was translated into French.
something a failure or a mistake, instead calling it a glitch. The rationale is that a failure
or a mistake is finalsomething you cant take backbut a glitch is an opportunity to
recover and build a relationship in the process.
Failure doesnt need to be embraced. However, it needs to be accepted as part of life,
business, and innovation. We expect and value failure as part of the process, said
Oliver. The culture is even more extreme at Facebook, where Berman explained that no
one is criticized for failing but, rather, for not trying hard enough.
Lead infectiously
Strong leaders dont just maintain control. They communicate their vision clearly, which
enables others to think expansively.
To achieve that ripple effect in their organizations, Mark Zuckerberg and Four Seasons
CEO Katie Taylor make their messaging simple, repeatable, and relatable. Zuckerberg
has championed Facebooks mission with such focus that the motto of moving fast and
breaking things has permeated popular culture. Taylor has worked with senior leaders
to develop an innovation handbook and videos for 35,000 employees.
Both executives recognize that while strong, senior-level leadership is crucial, lowerlevel leadership should shepherd innovation. Nothing happens in a hotel unless the GM
decides its important to him or her, said Chris Hunsberger, Four Seasons Executive
Vice President of Product and Innovation. To secure buy-in, Hunsbergers team
selected some of its most influentialand perhaps skepticalGMs to shape
BLUEWATER and join the global roadshow.
unleash its employees innate innovative tendencies. We didnt leave anyone out of the
equation, from busboys to servers to line cooks, said John Johnson, an Executive Chef
in charge of implementing BLUEWATER at Four Seasons New York. The creativity and
energy required for innovation were in Four Seasons employees before BLUEWATER
existed; the program just gave them a channel to contribute, a common language, and
rules to play by. Its like our employees were waiting for this, like someone had lifted the
lid off, said Oliver.
Facebook and Four Seasons have dissimilar missions, and yet there are commonalities
in how they go about them. Both have a clear understanding of who they areand who
they are not; incorporate innovation into their DNA; understand the importance of
momentum; see the value in failure; encourage expansive thinking beyond senior
leadership; and recognize that innovation is innate in all of us. These are similarities that
translate not just in the tech and hospitality sectors, but to any business looking to build
and sustain a culture of innovation.
Achieving excellent customer service requires a culture change in your library organization that
is driven internally through the engagement and validation of staff. The complex subjects of
behavior change and persuasion have been studied as far back as the ancient Greeks. Aristotles
seven causes of human motivation conclude that insight alone does not produce behavior change.
A persons behavior will only change when that persons beliefs change. Today, our systems are
built around giving information; telling people what and how to act and behave; and thinking
because weve given information that something different will happen. Yet, people cannot and
will not change simply because theyre told to.
A Facilitative Mindset
There are four common mindsets around customer service in libraries. They range from an
intense scarcity model to a positive abundance model that focuses on success.
1. Its my job to protect the material we own.
2. Its my job to enforce the rules.
3. How can I serve you [both internal and external customers]?
4. I care about peoples success. How can I help people be most successful?
Mindset number four is a facilitative mindset, where staff focus on helping people be successful
in whatever ways they define success. A facilitative mindset is achieved when staff members feel
valued and confident in their ability to serve. In a facilitative mindset people are thinking, How
can I make it easy for this person to meet their needs? Good customer service is a behavior. We
act based on what we believe, our prior experiences, and how we feel in the moment which
includes our status in relation to others. Therefore, internal culture must change. People cant
achieve an authentic facilitative mindset without trusting that they are valued and supported by
their coworkers and the administration. They need to know, for instance, that they arent going to
get in trouble for forgiving a fine or misunderstanding a rule and that their ideas will be heard
and considered. Additionally, people need to become aware of the habits that arent working, and
learn the skills and behaviors of good service.
A foundation of trust in the internal culture is needed before you can expect staff to feel safe
enough to be creative with customer needs and confident enough that they can help. Supporting
the professional and personal development of staff in any way possiblethrough trainings,
conversations, conferences, and time to practice or learnwill help them feel valued. All of
these things will contribute to staff members achieving a facilitative mindsest. This is a key
underpinning to ensuring a vibrant customer service culture at your library.
encourage creativity or risk-taking. All of us know things intellectually that we do not apply in
our lives. Before change can happen, we must each decide to be respectful of others perspectives
and have more open conversations.
2. Engage, dont spend. Excellent customer service isnt the result of buying more things. Too
often little to no input is sought from the people delivering the service and most affected by
changes. Staff members have ideas about improving service and their workplaces. They want to
make a difference. People are most often resistant to change when they feel their opinions and
ideas arent heard and dont matter. There is a lot of talk in libraries about engaging the
community; we need to start by engaging our staff.
3. Help people understand their sphere of influence. Give your customer-facing library staff a
sense of control. Give them clarity over rules, responsibility, and decision making.
4. Practice empathy. A lot of improving customer service comes down to understanding the other
persons perspective. Have conversations with the intent to understand, not to be right. The value
is in actively listening, without judgment. Its just as important with coworkers as it is with
customers.
5. Make the connection between internal and external service. Very often, the least valued people
and the people we treat the worst in an organization (financially and otherwise), are the ones
facing the customer. Many are the lowest in the internal hierarchy, so what is left but for them to
lord the scraps of their power over the customer? Anything you can do to make staff feel
significant will enhance service to the customer.Libraries are community-centric by definition;
we need our values around serving the community to be mirrored internally. Help your staff
connect their piece of the work to the bigger picture and model the behaviors internally that we
want used with customers.
In my workshops over the past eighteen years, Ive found that these elements are most helpful
when asking people to open up to learning about themselves and thinking differently:
Be playful. Get people to laugh. Find ways to play together to break down
barriers.
Dont judge. Believe and model that it is safe to take risks, and okay to share
worries, fears, confusion, frustration, and misunderstandings. Nobody is
wrong; were all learning together.
Practice and reflect. Help people become aware of their habits. Practice new
behaviors in a safe environment so that staff feels confident using them
under pressure with customers. Allow time for group discussion and individual
reflection.
Impacting cultural change requires individual behavior change. Will Durant summarized
Aristotle brilliantly in his 1924 book, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the
Worlds Greatest Philosophers: We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act
but a habit. Excellent external service is the result of an internal culture that has a facilitative
mindset and focuses on the success and significance of people. It needs to happen at every level
of the organization. Decide now to make the change to positive customer serviceinternally and
externally. Its simple, though not necessarily easy. Start practicing a facilitative mindset with
your coworkers and your customers, and watch your communication, interaction, and dynamics
change to produce a culture of excellent service.
Providing the perfect customer experience (CX) is no easy task and yet
studies suggest that theres a strong link between CX and customer loyalty.
Of course, CX is a sum of its parts, of which there are many, and probably
the most important of these is the way that your customers are treated by
service staff. For those on the front line, it can be difficult to discover and
maintain a positive mindset at all times customers can be rude, even
abusive if they become frustrated.
This can be easily overcome though, its just a case of having the right
mindset, so lets have a look today at how this can be achieved.
1
Put Yourself in Their Shoes
Customers are just people like any other and for a customer service rep to be
effective, they should have a certain amount of empathy. This means that
you should train staff firstly how to listen effectively and how to pick up
signals from the customer to inform the response. This isnt as difficult as it
Empathy begins with the business owner and if you want your staff to show it
to your customers, then its important that you show it to your staff too. Ask
your staff to put themselves in the shoes of the customer and put yourself in
the shoes of your staff. Lead by example and create team building exercises
in which your staff act out customer scenarios to learn from and build upon.
Remember, everyone is a customer the boss, the reps, the cleaner and
customer service reps should always attempt to treat customers as they
themselves would want and expect to be treated. A Buffer article I read
recently offers the advice that new customers should be thought of like a
first date always jump in and offer to fix things asap for new customers and
you will have started off on the right footing.
2
Build Relationships
A good customer service rep doesnt approach conversation with a customer
as a problem, but as an opportunity. With this in mind, encourage staff to
think about customers as they would be somebody they know. As a training
exercise, ask them to imagine that one of these people has just contacted
the customer service desk and that they will have to deal with them.
Its likely that the rep will immediately be more relaxed and friendly and this
will be apparent in their tone and body language. This can then be used to
cement the understanding that customers should be communicated with in
the same manner. From the very first time a customer gets in touch, the aim
of the rep should be to wow them.
Be friendly, informal and listen to what each individual customer has to say
Allow the customer to lead in terms of how they are addressed (sir, madam,
first names, surnames.)
With regards to the latter this is something that I see often and find
exceptionally annoying. For example, last week I contacted the customer
service department of a hosting company which Ive recently moved my
sites to via live chat. I had a question surrounding pricing which appeared to
have changed from the initial price that I paid. The operator was very cold,
not at all friendly, and at the end of the chat I asked him to pass my
comments (essentially a complaint) to the relevant department. I was
exceedingly polite and wished him a great evening at the same time. All of
my comments were ignored completely and the message I received back
was a standard copy-and-paste response thanking me for contacting them
and asking that I rate my experience via a survey.
Had I been inclined to fill in that survey, my responses would have been far
from positive. Why? Because the customer service rep made me feel
like he didnt care and it would be putting him out to actually offer
any constructive help.
This from a global concern too. So train staff to think about customers as a
person that they would interact with in everyday life to enable them to get
into a mindset that allows them to be friendly. Scripts detract heavily from
this its so easy to hear or see when someone is reading from one users
want a personal response, not one thats been penned by a sales person
looking to manipulate someone into make a purchase.
3
Be Generous
Good customer service springs from a place where the business is secure
and its employees can afford to be generous in terms of the time they give,
the approachability of their staff and that theres plenty to share. Businesses
that are struggling tend to offer a poor level of customer service because
they dont feel that they have enough to give without it affecting profits
this is a dangerous mindset and one that means that the business will almost
certainly fail.
Think about the times when youve contacted a business and theyve refused
to budge an inch when it comes to giving you some redress when things
have gone wrong. Perhaps the business has insisted that you pay for returns,
or maybe theyve only given you a part-refund on a product that arrived and
proved to be unsuitable. Would you ever do business with them again? No.
So dont be one of those companies train your staff to know exactly what
they can give when a complaint/return/refund request comes their way. If the
staff have the authority to give refunds, etc., then not only will they feel
much more positive about their job (and this will come across in the
communication) but it will also serve to ensure that your customers go away
happy and ready to recommend your products to a friend.
4
Be a Winner
According to Adam Torporek, author of Be Your Customers Hero: Real-World
Tips & Techniques for the Service Front Lines theres one question that can
help customer service professionals to get into the perfect customer-facing
mindset. He maintains that this one question immediately helps to shift a
CSPs perspective from reactions to solutions.
customer service staff to have the right mindset for dealing with your
customers, then its necessary to create it. A positive working environment,
where everyone is happy, will go much further to getting your reps into the
right frame of mind than any training will.
Have the tools they need to carry out their job effectively and efficiently
No matter what the size of your business, ongoing training and development
should always be a central part of it if its to grow and flourish. Its not
necessarily the case that you should always be able to offer promotion
either. Your staff should have the opportunity to further their career even if it
isnt with you in the long term (although its desirable, obviously). Creating a
healthy company culture where staff learn and flourish will also help you to
attract and retain top talent.
Customer service is a tough job and its not particularly easy to get
everything right. However, promoting and fostering a positive mindset is
vital and to do this, its necessary to put the right training in place and to
ensure that the workforce is happy overall. A happy worker is one thats
much more inclined to show the empathy that good customer service needs
so its up to you, the business owner, to ensure that you create the right
environment for your staff to carry out their job effectively.
When I first saw it, I thought it was some sort of circuit diagram. Actually,
it's a Visio diagram (12 of 136) that contains one of these complex
workflow modules. Let me rephrase that: the diagram
Though it may seem like it, that block is not a standard Visio component.
It's a "Workflow Action" custom-component that was developed by the
consultants. Each of these Workflow Action blocks is linked-to and linkedby several other Actions, which may be defined in the same Visio diagram,
another Visio diagram, or an external J2EE module.
The system core utilizes these Visio diagrams for its business workflow
logic and dynamic user interface generation, and it is through these
diagrams that the system is "Customer Friendly." To add or change
functionality to the system, all the "technically unskilled" end user would
need to do is modify one of these diagrams. It was that simple.
Obviously, no end user ever saw or touched these diagrams. Though the
"proof of concept" was simple enough for a "technically unskilled" user,
changing the workflow logic on the full-developed system required a
highly-trained programmer and a highly-powered desktop (2-4GB RAM).
And that's where John came in; he actually managed to make it through
the six months of "peer training" required to "program" the diagrams.
The final straw for John was when he was tasked with making a "simple UI
change." That's when he learned that, to make the generated UI more
usable, the system allowed for developers to incorporate JavaScript
"tweak files." What ended up happening is that the entire front-end
became JavaScript: it did everything from displaying a navigation bar to
validating data on the form.
And what was John's simple UI change?, you might ask. It was to "use
the [JavaScript] HTML Parser (/inc/p2/v/hparser.js) to filter out Iowaspecific text before it's passed to the page renderer
(/inc/p2/v/hrenderer.js)."