Concierge customer service provides a phenomenal case for your customers to continue doing business with you. Recently, I sat down with Randy MacLean, President of WayPoint Analytics, to discuss the two crucial steps to set up an effective concierge customer service team.
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Concierge-level customer service should be set aside for only your very best customers. This level of service becomes an incredibly strong retention tool. It may seem like an oversized project at first, but getting concierge customer service running in your business is easier than you think.
To start, identify at least two customer service representatives to specifically focus on concierge-level customer service. Why two? Because when your best customer calls in, they always get someone on the phone immediately – there’s no busy signal or waiting for someone to call back.
Not Everyone Can Do This
Having the right people to answer the needs of your best customers is critical. Your best-suited service representatives will be those who will take ownership of problems and ask the right questions to solve them.
Kathy Kolbe put together a useful resource to analyze how people naturally take action. This tool helps you find the best people for these important roles.
The second step is defining the concierge customer service representative role. Create good job descriptions with clear expectations, responsibilities, and authorities. If your team isn’t clear on their role and its limits, they can feel overwhelmed as everything will seem to become a priority. A clearly defined system helps decrease stress levels and will make them more effective.
Monitor How It’s Working
Once your people and your system are working, ask even more questions. In addition to checking in on the satisfaction of your customers, talk to your sales and customer service staff. Their feedback about your system is important, too.
For a good external culture, your company’s internal culture has to be good, too. A standard measure of work stress is “how do you feel about how much you have to do and the time you have to do it in?” If you don’t respond to internal issues and don’t treat your staff well, the service they offer your customers will suffer.
In two steps, it is possible to define the concierge customer service role and choose (and empower) the best people for the job. Your new system can save stress for your sales and service teams, gather critical feedback and information about your most important customers, improve internal morale and external service, boost efficiency, and better direct the resources your company has available for maximum revenue and profit.
Dr. Jeanne Hurlbert, President of Hurlbert Consulting, brings to her role as STAFDA’s endorsed customer service consultancy expertise in sociology and survey research. After spending more than 25 years in academia, she now uses her extensive behavioral science expertise to help companies like yours distinguish yourselves through customer service. What sets her approach to customer service apart is that she begins by helping companies meld research and marketing to find out exactly (a) what their customers want and (b) how well they’re succeeding in giving customers what they want. Jeanne provides STAFDA members with 30 minutes of complimentary consulting per year; please identify yourself as a STAFDA member when you contact her. You can schedule a consult with her by going to www.ConciergeCustomerService.com or you can call her at 888-590-9677. And, if you’d like to complete her complimentary assessment, just go to www.FixYourService.com.
