5 Steps to Building a Customer Service Culture

Great businesses have a great Customer Service Culture.

Customer Service is not a ‘tick in the box’ on a to do list.  It is a way of being that needs to be consistent and fully embedded throughout the organisation for it to be impactful, and meaningful.

Your organisations culture, values and principles will be communicated to the outside world through your Customer Service Culture.  With internal and external customer service aligned, employee engagement will improve, as will the strengthening of teams.

So how can you build a Customer Service Culture?

We use the concept of Customer Service Principles in our training.  Here are 5 steps you can follow to help build a Customer Service Culture in your business:

1. Decide on what “Excellent” Customer Service looks like for your business.  Create the customer service vision.
2. Now you have your vision, it’s time to reflect on what you do well, and what you need to do more of to improve / enhance customer service.  Identify how to get to your vision.
3. Spend time thinking about your values around customer service.  How do you want customers to describe your customer service? Right first time? Customer first?
4. How can you action these values?  Think about what your customers want you to ‘do’ for them and create a clear action plan for your staff to deliver.  These are specific and quantifiable customer service standards.  These specific actions and behaviours will be used by each person consistently both for internal and external customers such as ‘respond to a customer email within 24 hours’.
5. Finally, look at how you can embed these customer service standards into everything you do, both internally and externally, i.e. at customer meetings and presentations, communicating on the telephone, writing to customers and embedding into all company systems and processes, even paperwork!

We have been delivering customer service training for over 30 years and are experienced in supporting businesses to develop culture.

Over the years, in addition to seeing the results of businesses setting best practice for customer service, we have observed amazing additional results.  Teams have bonded, managers have had the tools to set behavioural standards and recruited using these standards, and employees have been engaged throughout the process of creating the customer service standards.

If you would like to know more about creating culture in your organisation you may be interested in reading our insight ‘3 Ways to Creating Culture‘.

If you would like to develop your business further and embed a Customer Service Culture, please get in touch.  Our customer servce programmes are tailored to individual business needs, so there can be no specific content on our website, however, we are happy to discus examples with you.

We hope you found this insightful, and are more than happy for you to share this article.