The following is a follow-up of JimGiacobbe's article "What is Service Anticipation?" Read on to learn how cultivating the right work environment sets you up for service anticipation success.
As the President and CEO, I can’t provide great customer service unless the whole team at United Solutions understands what’s expected. We have a mission statement at United Solutions:
The mission of the United Solutions Company is to host quality products and services using the best of breed technology, with an emphasis on service and collaboration, to help our customers remain competitive and profitable.
We need to make sure we stay true to that in order for our clients to remain competitive; that’s the only way we, in turn, stay competitive in the industry. Excellent service is our magic and I’m always working to make sure it remains our magic.
We will answer calls sooner, we will know needs earlier, and we will provide service with a consultative approach. We will get ingrained in their business, recommend vendors, know what projects they are working on, and embed other processes they may need. Credit unions do business with us because we provide an intimate level of service that the big box core processors aren’t able to provide.
Since we coined service anticipation in our industry, one of our biggest customer service goals is the 30-minute service level agreement. We know having your phone called answered is a big deal. When you call United Solutions Company, if your phone call isn’t answered, we will call you back in 30 minutes or less. If we haven’t called you back in 30 minutes, then I have the clients call my personal cell phone.
We even made bobble heads that looked like me with my cell phone number on them! I want the clients to know we’ve set the bar higher when it comes to service excellence. The rest of the staff knows that if they don’t call clients back on time, I will hear about it. I don’t think there are many other technology companies or even CUSOs in our industry that are providing the same level of service.
When it comes to staffing, always overstaffed, never understaffed, has become a motto for us. At United Solutions Company, we analyze the amount of calls coming in and strive to employ and train the necessary amount of talented people to provide the level of service that our customers need. That means every part of our company, from our IT and collections departments, to client services and sales departments, should have enough people with the right education and training to get the job done. Although I always tell my staff and our clients that I would rather have fewer talented people that know what they are doing than have a larger staff that cannot provide answers, our real goal is to have employees that can actually help a customer when they need it. It’s part of our culture.
And that dedication to immediate customer service doesn’t stop at the staff level. As the CEO, if I see a call coming in and we’re really busy, I’ll help answer the telephones. Sometimes a customer will tell me, “I didn’t mean to get you on the phone.” My answer is that as an organization, we want to provide service excellence. When my staff sees me rushing to pick up a telephone, they know what is expected of them. I don’t ever want someone to call in and get a voicemail or get stuck in a call tree. I encourage our managers to lead by example and take a very hands-on approach, believing it isn’t beneath anyone to answer a customer service call.
