Seeking: Customer Satisfaction Work Instruction

[Tom W]

Please let me start by saying I did a search on this and did not find exactly what I was looking for. I am NOT looking for a freebee or someone to do my work; but here is the situation.

My boss has been working on a concept for a Customer Satisfaction / Service Work Instruction for several months now. We have a procedure that addresses how we measure customer satisfaction and how important it is to us; however he wants to document a general work instructions that explains the desired company methods of customer interaction and communication. Not so much on the CA side of it, but the ethical, polite and professional manner that he wants communication with the customers to take place.

We have several people communicating with customers throughout all three shifts and they are at various levels within the workforce. We are a service provider - Heat Treating - so we are in constant communication with both our large customers and our small ones. He is looking for establishing guidelines for this communication with customers and the positive image of our workforce to the customer.

One of the struggles is the vast number of people that may communicate or interact with our customers from time to time and their different ideas of customer service. For example our QA Manager interacts differently with a customer compared to our truck drive that goes there to pick up an order.

So with that all said, does anyone have anything similar or any comments about this? I don't want to create a nightmare here with the step by step process of talking to a customer - just general guidelines of what is expected when interaction / communication takes place.

He has drafted up some text for different situations and what is expected, but he is concerned that we might be trying to hard to make people act a certain way and we might loose something in that. Our customer satisfaction results of our top 100 customer (which is 92% of our sales) has steadily gone up the last several years, but we now want to take it to the next step and make improvements in this area inorder to increase customer satisfaction and customer retention.

We charge a little more than our competitors, but it shows in our quality and our service. We want to ensure that we continue this trend.

Any comments (constructive comments - I didn't want to leave myself open there) on this would be great. Thanks in advance.

[Mike S.]

Tom,

Off the top of my head, FWIW, it seems to me that this type of issue is better dealt with via training than by a WI/procedure. I'm sure there are several places where you can either hire an expert (consultant) in this area to do on-site training, or videos that could be bought for internal training and supplemented by discussion from your in-house experts. Books are probably also out there by the dozens. Or maybe just internal training and role-playing with your internal experts. I just don't see a procedure being much help here. You might outline some basics and general expectations in a procedure/WI but I think structured training classes of some type would be more effective. JMO.

Added later: A local community college might also be a good resource.

[Tom W]

Originally Posted by Mike S.

Tom,

Off the top of my head, FWIW, it seems to me that this type of issue is better dealt with via training than by a WI/procedure. I'm sure there are several places where you can either hire an expert (consultant) in this area to do on-site training, or videos that could be bought for internal training and supplemented by discussion from your in-house experts. Books are probably also out there by the dozens. Or maybe just internal training and role-playing with your internal experts. I just don't see a procedure being much help here. You might outline some basics and general expectations in a procedure/WI but I think structured training classes of some type would be more effective. JMO.

Added later: A local community college might also be a good resource.

Let me put another spin on it. Could you see something like this in HR? A company policy for all employees?

[Mike S.]

Yep, it kind of sounds like stuff I've seen in HR manuals before relating to expected behavior like dress codes, language, etc. I'm sure lots of organizatiosn say something like "you can get in trouble if you do something unprofessional/disrespectful toward a customer or co-worker".

That doesn't mean you can't address it from both perspectives -- "rules" stuff in the HR manual and some kind of practical training on "world class customer service" or "effectively communicating with customers" or some such thing. There's nothing wrong with improving the effectiveness of the customer interface! And if the Big Cheese thinks it's important, other folks had probably better consider it important pretty soon as well. I'd propose attacking it from both directions and give him some options and maybe even ballpark pricing for different kinds of training.

[Rob Nix]

Training at orientation might not be a bad idea, i.e. training in dealing one on one with customers, drawing them out (getting their perceptions) without drawing them into a heated debate.

Perhaps also there could be a form that an employee could fill out after having dealings with a customer that summarizes their positive and negative points as well as any suggestions they offer. These could be collected and used to report overall customer satisfaction.

(Just some off the wall thoughts).

Practice the Golden Rule. If the content isn't the problem, and you choose to allow some "individualism", tell them to put themselves in the Customer's seat and act accordingly. JAT

[Mike S.]

Why the anger, Sheriff?

[Al Rosen]

Tom:

I've seen HR policies on phone etiquette. You might try a Google search and see if you can go from there.