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Your organization’s success depends on this foundational piece of the puzzle-Serving your customers well! But to do that you first need a definition of service that applies in all circumstances.
I don’t like to get caught up in the minutiae of defining terminology unless something fundamental to your business isn’t clear to you and your team.
When I worked with the Singapore government, their goal was to become “outstanding in service.” But everyone across the organization wasn’t on the same page about what outstanding service meant. And that’s when I developed my definition of service:
👉 Service is taking action to create value for someone else.
What makes something valuable? In the end, your customer decides! By evaluating every part of the service transaction, you and your team can find the ways to make it a more valuable experience for your customer. And this is what sets your organization apart from the competition. Plus, when you deliver value to your customers, you win loyal customers for life.
Watch the video to see how to add value throughout the customer experience.
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Below is an Autogenerated Transcript
So, you talk about customer service, I say customer experience. They’re obviously very intertwined. How would you define them? What do they mean to you? Yeah. Very good. I don’t spend too much time trying to parse the fine distinctions of terminology unless there’s something that fundamentally needs a definition that hasn’t yet been made clear. And I first encountered that when I heard that the nation wanted to become outstanding in service and create more service value, and my question was, “What do you mean by service?” And I got all kinds of bad answers. Like “Serve other people the way you would like to be served.” Well, what if they’re not like you? Or “Give other people what they want.” But what if you were a medical doctor and you know that’s not what they need? Or “Provide people with whatever they expect.” But what do you do with the go-getter who says, “No, we should exceed expectations.”? So, all of that mixed up language made it very difficult to teach properly. So, I actually ended up writing a definition for the word service, which goes like this: “Service is taking action to create value for someone else.” The moment you hear it, you go, “Yeah, that makes sense.” And it makes sense for B2B, B2C, frontline, boardroom, supervisor, manager. Taking action to create value for someone else. Internal service. External service. Got it all. Okay, so then what makes something valuable? And when you say create value. Well, it’s an assessment that somebody who’s the recipient of the service says, “You know what? That contributes to my well-being. That’s why I value it.” Maybe you answered a question for me. Maybe you gave me an option, maybe give me a recommendation. Maybe you did something that I needed to have done, but in some way you contributed to my well-being. And so that’s what made it valuable. So that’s that whole definition of service. If I say customer experience, what is the experience made up of? Many, many, many moments in which someone is forming an opinion. And it could be one I’m just researching at the website, or maybe I’m going out, I’m going to buy something in e-commerce, and make a reservation and then I’m going to get a confirmation and then there’s a payment and then it’s going to be delivered and I’m going to see the packaging. And each and every one of those steps along the way, we could say, “Well, overall, that’s the journey of customer experience.” and that’s not wrong. But if I want to improve the customer experience, I’m going to have to go in to each of these various transactions within the journey and within those, look at the particular, what we call, perception points. In the past, they’ve been called moments of truth or moments of touch, or whatever. I call them, perception points, because it’s from the point of view of the person being served. So, if you want to improve customer experience, what do you have to do? Well, you’ve got to go in and actually look at How are we serving here? How are we serving here? How are we serving here? What service experience are they having there, and then how do we make improvements?