Top-down Service
What creates an atmosphere of friendliness and a culture of truly caring customer service? Is it simply having great employees? Or a generous benefits package? How about an effective staff training program? Clearly these points are part of it, but there is a lot more to it.
Internal customer service, meaning how everyone in the company interacts with each other, is what sets the tone for the overall level of customer service. This is true in small businesses and it is true in large corporations. Larger companies have distinct levels or echelons of employees, owners or directors, upper management, middle management, and so on. Internal word of mouth between these “groups within the group” are the corner stone of a successful business.
What Employees Want
Employees want to know where things stand and they want stability. Sudden change never goes over well. Direct, honest communication works two ways: Ideally, management would communicate exactly what they think to employees and all employees would feel perfectly safe in communicating what’s on their minds to management.
While this ideal may never be completely achieved one can see that every company is somewhere on the scale of open communication. Where communication is more open and honest the employees tend to be more loyal to the employer.
Another thing that employees want is simply to be able to contribute to the company. Anyone who is part of a group wants to help out and make things better. When their efforts are ignored or rebuffed they tend to lose interest. If a person feels they cannot be of help to the group they stop caring.
Who are your customers?
Everyone knows the basic definition of the term “customer”. It’s a person who purchases your goods or services. This definition applies to most business transactions.
Now let’s look at the customers of a government office. In many cases the person does not purchase or pay for the service. So let’s revise that basic definition to: A person or group for whom you provide services or products.
These two concepts are similar in that the organization is providing services or products to an outside entity, an individual or group. One could say that these are external customers.
Internal Customers
Internal customers are those individuals or groups within a company or agency who are helping to provide/sell goods and services to the external customers.
Each department or division of an organization is a “customer” to the other. The sales department is a customer of HR. Shipping is a customer of Sales. All departments are customers of reception or the call center. Effective management views everyone, clients and all employees, as customers.
In the same way that a company can have bad word of mouth with its customers, an employee can create bad word of mouth inside a company. Have you ever seen an employee whom many of the other employees constantly complained about? “If you have a problem, don’t ask George for help, he’s always grumpy.”
An entire department or part of a company can have bad internal word of mouth. “Those idiots in shipping can’t even write their own names.” or “The planning department just sits on their butts all day long.” Have you ever heard anything like this, in your company?
Most companies and agencies tend to focus solely on external customers. The paying customer gets more attention than the company employees. This can be a grave mistake.
In any company with more than two employees a majority of the customer’s complaints stem from a lack of communication or coordination between employees, sections, groups or departments.
I’ve seen this in countless businesses: The wait staff bickering with the cooks; the technical support staff cursing the sales staff; the management critical of the employees, and vice-versa. It’s hard to be friendly, courteous and smile to the customers when someone you work with is being rude, nasty or disrespectful to you.
If you have work groups or departments bickering in your company, you had better get busy. Right there is the source of some, if not all, of your word of mouth complaints.
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