Your reputation is your organizations most important asset and each employee must maintain it by providing top-flight customer service because it has been well defined and clearly communicated, People in all successful and lasting organizations know both what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.

If customer service is your way of life it will serve as a behavioral guide for everyone in your organization through every economic cycle, marketplace fluctuation, technological advance and management change. Management guru, Stephen Covey refers to such a guide as “true North.”

Great customer service can only be delivered by happy people who have fun with and like their jobs. A friendly, fun and teamwork-centered workplace must begin at the top and permeate the entire organization. How can you promote a friendly, fun and yet a competitive environment where your people engage in friendly competition with one another yet socialize and get to know each other?

People often work long hours and deal with unhappy customers and should be rewarded…not for working hard, but for taking care of the customer. Many people use “hard work and long hours” as an “excuse” for “customer abuse.” How can you reward your people for customer centric performance and tie all recognition and rewards to great customer service?

Can you encourage employees to behave like entrepreneurs? Can you tie bonuses to customer service and withhold them from people who fall short in that area, even though the company is profitable? Compensation must be tied to values and you must not reward behavior that doesn’t support those values.

Bonus compensation based on profits consistent with your values makes everyone act like an owner rather than an employee and should be part of everyone’s pay package. While rank and file employees might get only a small percentage of salary from a bonus, managers and executives might have almost all of their compensation based on customer centric profitability.

High tech and high touch! When customer service is your way of life the only reason to use technology should be “to enhance the customer experience.” Since customer service is the lifeblood of every successful business, technology must be used to complement, never to replace, the human touch. How often have you been caught up in “technology hell” as you continue endless phone prompts or dropdown menus for a service issue or even to make a purchase?

Technical people must first understand your business before they can design customer centric technology systems. They must become a part of your team and dedicated to serving and supporting your strong customer service values.

According to Kirk Kazanjian, author of Exceeding Customer Expectations, when Enterprise Car Rental hired its first chief technology officer he was sent to work in the field for nine months. He rented cars at branch offices, met with employees, and learned the details of the business. Only after learning what the rental process was like for the customer, was he prepared to write programs for making it more customer-friendly and efficient.

Kazanjian continues, “For many years, the company’s rental transaction had been a manual process. That involved writing forms by hand, tracking cars on chalkboards, and jotting customer information on index cards. As with all new technologies, Enterprise incurred costs. But they were secondary to the ability to exchange crucial information and, especially, to improve customer service.”

“Quality is everyone’s job one,” was once a slogan of Ford. If you’re to stay in business, every employee must know how what they do serves the customer and that, “Taking care of customers is everyone’s job one.”

Promote a friendly, fun and yet competitive environment and reward people not for working hard, but for taking care of the customer. Encourage everyone to behave like an owner by paying them a bonus based on profits generated by customer service centered behavior and only use technology that enhances the customer’s experience.

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