What’s the Secret to Providing Excellent Customer Service?

Excellent customer service. We all want our customers to experience it. But if you’re not careful you may be going about it the wrong way. First let me ask you a question:

Do you know who your most important customers are?

It’s your employees.

That’s right. The ones who collect a paycheck from you are more important than all those people paying you money.

Good Leaders are Hard to Find

It can seem backwards, I know. Your employees cost you money and your customers pay you money. So it’s tempting to treat your customers better than your employees. But if you do that you’ll never be that excellent service company you’re striving to be. You’ll always be cycling through employees wondering why good help is almost impossible to find…I hate to be the one to break it to you but what might be even harder to find are good leaders and bosses.

Now let me clarify something real quick. I am not some disgruntled employee who’s mad at his boss. In fact I’m self-employed which means I’m my own boss (so I better treat myself right ). And prior to owning my copywriting business I was an employee at Amica Insurance who happened to have great leaders. My boss at that company was the best boss I’ve ever had and an amazing person. So this is not coming from some bitter employee.

The reason I’m writing this is because I see what works and what doesn’t with businesses.

Do You Trust Your Employees?

One thing that doesn’t work is not trusting your employees. Let me just say this: if you don’t trust your employees why on earth are they working for you? Do you not have the courage to fire them? I don’t understand why anyone would hire people they don’t trust.

But if you trust them they might make mistakes. And guess what? They will.

Humans are not perfect and mistakes happen. You cannot control that. What you can control is how you respond when someone makes a mistake. Do you fly off the handle and make your employee feel like crap? Or do you affirm them in the midst of their mistake and encourage them to keep going on?

It’s no secret. Happy employees make for happy customers. You won’t last long if you can’t retain employees and besides your customers will start to wonder why every time they come in they see new faces. Employee retention says a lot about the leadership of a company.