Be Consistent

I recently read a book called Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles. The sub title is “A revolutionary Approach to Customer Service”. It is an easy and quick read about the three steps to creating an extraordinary customer experience and thereby “raving fans” of our business. I want to focus on the execution points the authors make.

Whatever you decide to do to create the customer experience, it must be done consistently, without fail. Consistency is crucial. Consistency provides credibility. Before you promise a service, be sure you can deliver. Improve that service in small increments rather than over promise a big change at the start. Customers have been promised service before and have been burned, so it may take some time to earn their trust. And it is better to be really good i.e. 100% consistent, at one or two things (that the customer cares about), than hit and miss on several promises of service.

How do you ensure consistency? Here is what the authors say (actually, in the book it is a fairy god mother speaking). “To be consistent you have to have systems. At the core of every great service organization is a package of systems and a training program to inculcate those systems into the soul of that company”
“Systems are predetermined ways to achieve a result, not the system for the systems sake. That is the difference between rules and systems. With a rule the emphasis is on the procedure, not necessarily the result. Rules create robots”.

This is an interesting point and one that is reinforced in Richard Branson’s latest book. It is important to have systems in place and perhaps even suggested scripts but there must be room for flexibility and for judgment as well. At the end of the day, attaining the desired result is the goal, not following the rules. I think this is right on.