For Immediate Release

Customer-centric CEOs in Cyberspace.

To thrive in the online business world, your company must put customers first . . . and top echelon executives must set the example.

CEOs and top-level managers, are you really putting customers first? Everyone agrees that good customer relations are a cornerstone of a successful company, but it’s not always easy to find leaders that ingrain this principle into their policies and daily lives. However, in today’s business world—an arena that relies more and more on impersonal online transactions—providing excellent service is more important than ever. To survive and thrive in the Internet Age, your organization must become customer-centric . . . and it all begins with you.

Karen Leland and Keith Bailey—founders of Sterling Consulting Group and authors of the new Online Customer Service For Dummies® (Hungry Minds, Inc., 2001 ISBN: 0-7645-5316-X, $24.99)—say today’s business leaders must roll up their sleeves and demonstrate their customer commitment to the rest of the employees.

To illustrate, the authors offer the following case studies:

	Executives at a well-known communications company took complaint calls in the customer service department once a month and personally followed up on all calls until they were resolved.
	Executives at a rental car company took a weekly trip riding the bus from the rental location to the terminal to speak with passengers and get their impression of the service offered.
	A general manager in a transportation company started holding informal lunch gatherings on a regular basis. The meetings gave the employees a chance to ask him questions or make comments or suggestions related to improving the conditions at work and the service offered.

“In today’s internet inspired world, one of the hardest lessons for business leaders to learn is that neither excellent product quality nor the latest, greatest technology is the panacea that will cure all their customer relationship ills,” the authors emphasize. “Ultimately the key to long lasting customer loyalty and retention is going beyond the application of technological solutions and embracing a commitment to becoming a customer-centric organization.

Here are five tips—excerpted from Online Customer Service For Dummies—for making your organization more customer-centric:

1. Ask for feedback and utilize it.
One of the first and most important steps in becoming customer-centric is to know—rather than assume—what your customers want and expect of you, and well you are meeting and exceeding those expectations. You can put your fingers on the pulse of your customers’ experience by conducting surveys and focus groups. Gathering feedback from staff is the other significant aspect of discovering where you stand prior to improving your customer orientation.

2. Train and educate staff and managers.
Service training is the formalized, classroom style approach whose objective is to build skills and/or awareness in specific areas of service excellence. Education, on the other hand, is any process that underscores and illuminates how service improvement relates to specific jobs, tasks and behaviors. It can take the form of newsletters, briefings, meetings, videos, etc. Maximum effectiveness is gained when education and training are combined.

3. Design customer-centric processes and technology.
Examining and changing in-focused systems, i.e., those that work favorably for the company but unfavorable for the customer, becomes the fulcrum on which a successful move toward being customer-centric exists. Consequently, until the inherent service problems caused by the system are resolved, any ground to be gained in quality service improvement is limited.

4. Set consistent service standards.
If you ask ten people “what does being friendly to a customer mean?” you will more than likely receive ten different answers. The solution is to quantify service quality by developing specific, objective and measurable service standards that translate service qualities into specific behaviors and actions. (The authors cite a case study in which a hotel manager actually had to spell out to a front desk clerk the specifics of “friendly service”— smiling, making eye contact, using the customer’s name, etc.)

5. Reward and recognize service excellence.
Your efforts should include these three important elements:

	A formal recognition program that provides rewards for the individual or team that best fulfills the specified service criteria. The rewards will vary with each organization but will range from cash to movie tickets to vacations.
	An atmosphere of informal recognition. This is the casual everyday acknowledgment of staff that is often expressed by the manager’s spontaneous gestures such as thank you notes, pizza parties, posting customer compliment letters, etc.
	Salary and advancement. In the final analysis, all staff have to see some personal benefit in increasing their sensitivity toward customers. If these benefits are not in some way central to the possibility of advancement in pay and position in the organization then the gospel of service becomes just so much hot air.

Of course, these suggestions are all for naught if your employees don’t believe your commitment to customer service is real.

“Almost any business owner, executive or senior manager today, when asked, will nod their heads in complete agreement that excellent customer relations are a cornerstone of successful business,” say Leland and Bailey. “In the final analysis, however, it’s not what leaders say but, but the daily actions they take which create the reality as to what is really important and valued within their companies.”

Contact:
Celia Rocks
(412) 820-3004
CeliaRocks@aol.com