Often as businesses, we get over-excited about building systems to streamline the delivery of our customer experience. There is a tricky balance between over systemizing your business, causing your customers to feel like ‘just another client’ and under systemizing, where you may fail to deliver a quality customer experience at all.
How do we systemize our business processes and maintain our customer experience?
Its a good question, and one I have thought a lot about!
Personally, Systems help us to deliver day to day service, but customer excellence (or going above and beyond) for the customers often happens outside the systems. For this reason, i say teach the team to honour systems until such a point when being a good human trumps the policy… Then do what is right as a person.
We saw this in a recent case with one of our award winning members, there are so systems on how do deal with the situation they found them selves in, but what they did was deliver excellence, above and beyond what any system would have achieved.
I think this is a valid point @ashley.giles Could it be that systems give foundation to customer service but also arms the team member with the right information to make more customer-centric decisions that will promote a more individualized customer experience?
Systems are the key to a successful agency but ask any customer and they don’t agree. It’s the relationship we build that keeps them with us. For me it’s as simple as sending that templated email but following up with a phone call at the end of the day just to make sure they received it and ask if they have any questions.
Emails and texts don’t convey your personality or the tone of your voice.
@rebecca I couldn’t agree more with what you have to share. We used to have a moto many moons ago that email is for information and phone calls are for communication. I’ve always encouraged my team to do as you do. Get everything in writing but follow up with a phone or vice versa. Make the call and followup with an email.