The team at Uplifting Service have been working with our clients and Professor Jochen Wirtz for many years and are happy to report that the April issue of Harvard Business Review picked up our ideas and published a short piece in the Idea Watch section.  In this post, we add insights for service leaders and practitioners who would like to know more about customer service.

There is a better way to build a culture that quickly and dramatically improves customer service. While many people think changing an organization’s culture takes a long time, we have had the opportunity to experiment and observe a wide variety of companies for the past 25 years. We have been part of many innovations and successes. In the process, we observed four common mistakes companies make when implementing service revolutions, and we propose a more effective and proven way to make sure a service revolution sticks and achieves sustainable service improvements.  They are:

Rule #1: Don’t start with customer-facing employees. Instead, involve everyone, with a special focus on internal service providers.

Rule #2: Don’t start by training people on specific service skills, scripts and procedures. Instead, educate them first to a better understanding of what service excellence really means.

Rule #3: Don’t pilot the change. Instead, go big and go fast to build momentum for the new culture.

Rule #4: Don’t focus on traditional KPIs during the service revolution (such as satisfaction, NPS, operational measures, and sales). Instead, focus on leading “revolution indicators” (i.e., ideas generated and ideas implemented) to generate value-adding ideas and new service actions.

To learn more read the White Paper “Engineering a Service Revolution: How to build a service culture and improve service quality fast.”

Please comment below, contact me or Professor Wirtz.  We’d love to hear from you.

This post was originally published on https://www.upyourservice.com/blog