Eight critical steps to establish a customer service culture. “Every company’s greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company,” –Erwin Frand

During our recent weakened economy, many businesses have seen declining revenues and declining budgets. Declining budgets often lead to reduced staff levels and diminished services. To me, this does not make sense. I believe that it is during the down times, when service should be at the forefront and retention of loyal customers even more  of a focus.

When price wars fail to drive revenues, businesses often look to service to give them a competitive advantage. Many big business marketers are returning to a “service sells” mentality, however, many sell great customer service and few deliver. The problem is that few marketers have ever truly served a customer.

Throughout my years in business, I have had the opportunity to interact and develop a customer service philosophy. It is inherent that when you are in a service-based business, there will be times when your customer is compelled to offer you their feedback. It is what you do with this feedback that will shape the future and their impression of your business.

Upon reflection, most all of my interactions with displeased customers were not the result of a poor product, but rather a disappointing customer experience. Why is that? Because, product is not personal, customer service is. Briefly, I would like to share with you eight critical steps to establish a customer service culture.

1. Customers are the reason for work, not an interruption of work This sounds really obvious doesn’t it? How many times have you gone into a business only to wait while someone is on the telephone or busy doing some “non-service” task? Employees often lose sight of the importance of the customer and get consumed in lesser day to daytasks. Sure, there are tasks that need to be accomplished, but you cannot afford to sacrifice service to get them done. Good customer service must be a priority for you and your team. Without yourcustomers, you have no company!

2. Train, train, and continue to train.

Cross train your entire staff to be able to assist a customer regardless of their department. When a customer becomes upset they want their problem solved not to be shuffled between employees that are not empowered or enable to assist them.

•  Offer continuous customer service training for your staff and once they are providing good service, continue to train them.
•  Utilize role play situations to assist your staff in recognizing and experiencing both easy and difficult service opportunities. If an employee has a level of comfort with a difficult situation, they will be able to better handle it.

3. Empower your staff to serve

Establish a system of resources for your staff to serve the customer. Allow them latitude to take the necessary action to provide exceptional
service and resolve any issues should a customer become disgruntled. Create a structured system to allow your staff to serve customers.

o Establish a discretionary budget that an employee may access to recover a customer before you lose them. I recently learned that a
major hotel chain has a monetary fund available per year and peremployee enabling them to go above and beyond to ensure exceptional service. This empowers the employee to right a wrong or
create a “memorable” customer experience. I am not advocating large sums of money, but with regards to customer service, a small gesture can go a long way.

o Ask your staff what tools would enable them to provide better service. You would not send a fireman into a burning building without
the proper equipment. Failing to empower and enable your staff with the necessary tools to serve you customer leaves you with few options other than poor service.

4. Make service personal

o Greet repeat customers by name, if possible.
o Offer a handshake and introduce yourself. Creating service that is personal will not only retain customers, but help diffuse difficult situations should they arise.
o Thank your customers for their patronage. It really does make a difference.

5. It is ok to say “Yes”, even when you should say “No”

o Support your staff when they make customer service decisions. In my business, it is my policy that an employee can act without concern
for repercussion, as long as they are meeting a customer’s need. I have found this creates a greater willingness to serve the customer.
o Often times you could say “no” to a customer, however, “no” can have huge implications on your business. Ask yourself, “Am I willing to potentially lose 10 customers as result of this interaction?”

6. Offer a solution

o Shift from the problem to the process for resolution.
o Offer a choice between several options.
o Put yourself in their place.
o Involve the customer in determining the solution.
o Clearly explain any limitations that exist.

7. Recognize your staff members for outstanding service

o Implement a customer service awards program that recognizes employees for exceptional customer service. Maybe you have tried these without success and do not believe that they work. I would tend
to agree if the program were like most I have seen. Try something different; break the mold. One of my most successful clients offers spa treatments for his female employees if a customer goes out of their
way to recognize them for great service. Another client provides his employees with a “day off with pay” incentive for every five unsolicited, positive customer comments that he receives. These are
just a few examples that are “outside the box.” Be creative and generate a little excitement in your staff for customer service.

o Take the time to acknowledge employees at staff meetings. People want to leave their mark and feel that they matter. Taking the time to recognize them in front of their peers can make a real difference.

8. Ask your customers what they think of your service

The best way to find out if you are satisfying customers is to ask them. Formal efforts could include customer surveys, questionnaires,interviews or comment/suggestion cards. Informally, get out and talk with your customers and your staff. Ask them how they feel about service you are providing. Ideally, use a combination of both methods.

You may be thinking, “Why should I go ask for trouble? Who knows what I might hear if I ask?” That is the point. As you will see in the statistics below, most customers will not voice their disappointment with your service levels. They will simply leave and never return. If you do not ask about the quality of your service, you might make the wrong assumptions and feel that you can reduce service levels because you get few complaints and lead your organization into areas that turn off your customers or cause problems that you never intended. On the other hand, asking your customers about their satisfaction sends a message to them that you care about your business and about them. While you might hear some criticisms, you might also learn what you are doing right and see what you should modify.

In addition to the information, you will benefit from the interaction. Every interaction is a customer service opportunity. Make the most of each and every one. 
Most of us continue doing business with people and businesses who give good service. We might not say anything, but we reward good service providers by continuing to do business with them. If the service is outstanding, we will probably tell our friends and colleagues about it. Likewise, when we receive poor service most of us vote, not with our voice, but with our feet–we just leave.

In the 1980′s the White House Office of Consumer Affairs commissioned a report called the TARP study. The report revealed the following facts about unhappy customers:
96% of dissatisfied customers do not complain directly. 90% will not return. One unhappy customer will tell nine others. 13% will tell at least 20 other people Superior customer service is one of the most difficult deliverables facing the business world today. Selling service is the easy part, delivering on that promise offers a tremendous challenge. So I ask you, what can you do to improve the service you provide? Implement these eight steps and begin to excel at providing a superior customer culture today!

©Anthony Mullins – Elite Coaching Alliance 2005 Anthony Mullins is the President and Coach for The Elite Coaching
Alliance. He specializes in leadership development, business coaching, strategic planning, 1-on-1 coaching, facilitation and inspirational
speaking. He is the author of the upcoming book “Leadership Links.”   Anthony can be reached by e-mail: anthony@elitecoachingalliance.com
Visit his website @ http://www.elitecoachingalliance.com

Event Planning: Seven Best Practices  Successful Planners Use

Do you plan events for the corporate world like product launches, conferences, seminars, etc? If so, check out these seven practices of successful event planners.
It’s easy to dismiss these points thinking they’re trivial. I thought so too, once. I learnt better when I had events come apart because I chose to ignore these simple guidelines.

1Ensure that information flows freely across your team You rarely do event planning in isolation. You’ll almost always have a team of people to whom you’ve delegated various responsibilities. It’s very easy to make assumptions that everyone knows what the event is all about and how what they’re doing ties in with what everyone else is doing. Both assumptions can be totally incorrect. At the very beginning of the event planning effort, take the time to share your event’s objective and your overall plan for executing it with every single one of your team members. It’s best to get them all together to do this explaining. On an ongoing basis, have regular meetings to assess the progress so that everyone is aware of all aspects of the event.

2: Double check on speakers and all other performers

Sometimes, you come across events where the main speaker delivers his message wonderfully well, except that what he said had nothing to do with the purpose of the event!
Network with other event planners, find out who would be a good speaker for the event you’re planning. Someone might be an excellent speaker for one event, but not necessarily for another.
Ask the speaker for references. Find out as much as you can from those references. Ask them how many times they’ve heard him speak. What did they like about his performance? What did they not like? Do
they have any particular relationship with the speaker (which might color their opinion)?

3: Do detailed planning with a timeline
 
To attempt to organize a big event in a haphazard manner is to flirt with disaster. You must have a written schedule of all pre-event tasks, with specific dates for completion and specific persons responsible for
completing them. That may sound very basic, but this is one of the things that cause events to fail.

4: Read the fine print, know all details

As an event planner, you may be exposing yourself to serious financial and other risk if you are not entirely familiar with all aspects of the event. That includes all contracts you sign, all written instructions, orders and more. Since you are the event planner, you’re expected to be the expert on all these areas.
 
5: Have a crystal clear purpose for the event

Have you attended a seminar where the topic was too broad and the speakers seemed to talk all around the topic in a disconnected fashion? That’s what happens when you lack clarity of purpose about the event.
Is the event meant to be a strategic planning retreat for top management? Is it a seminar to bring medical professionals up-to-date on developments in a specialized field?
If it is a product launch, exactly what outcome is the event expected to achieve? Only when you and your team know the core objectives can you organize a focused event that meets those goals.

#6: Purchase event insurance

Think through what could disrupt your event and what your liabilities would be in such a case. Disruptions can include strikes, natural calamities, speakers not
showing up, drastically reduced attendance and more. Figure out the monetary and legal consequences. And get insurance to cover it.

7: Triple-check everything

This is one of the most useful planning mottos you can think of. Someone may have promised you three months ago that they’ll serve exotic Japanese snacks at high tea. Closer to event date but
sufficiently in advance, check again to make sure they remember the commitment. They have many other things to do and may have completely forgotten what they said months ago!  That’s why you need to triple-check everything as you go along. These straightforward guidelines can save you endless trouble if you’re planning and organizing events. Make them a part of your way of working.

Janet Burton is an experienced events planner. She also writes extensively and her articles cover planning tips, ideas for business
events, useful checklists for event planning and more. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Janet_Burton

Outsourcing Articles

The word outsourcing is often heard in the world of business today. It is something which has affected the business of almost every nature and every nation. Outsourcing is occurring in almost every country ofthis world to some extent. There are some leader countries in this field of outsourcing such as India and China. Before moving towards the topic of this article let us first understand what outsourcing is.

What is Outsourcing?
When discussed in simple words outsourcing is simply a formal agreement with a third party to perform a service for an organization. A more comprehensive definition for outsourcing would be that outsourcing is the concept of taking internal company functions and paying an outside firm to handle them. It is basically done for the following major reasons:

• To save money in terms of lowering costs
• To improve quality
• To free company resources for other activities such as focusing more on competencies

The concept of outsourcing began with the data-processing industry and today it has spread to vase areas which comprise of telemessaging and call centers. It would not all be wrong to say that outsourcing is the surge of the next generations. Another name used for outsourcing is off shoring which has the same meaning as outsourcing.

Technically speaking, outsourcing is not merely the contract with a third party to perform a service for an organization, but it also involves transferring a significant amount of management control and decisionmaking to the external supplier. The process of outsourcing is very much formal like other business processes and it always includes a considerable degree of two-way information exchange, coordination, and trust.

The concept of outsourcing gained popularity in the mid 1990s since then the trend of outsourcing has increased to a great extent. The reason for this increase in the popularity of the concept of outsourcing was the rapid growth in the number of high-tech companies in the early 1990s that were often not vast or large enough to incorporate and run large customer service departments of their own.

Different Techniques of Outsourcing

The concept of outsourcing was adopted by different organizations in different methods such as in some cases the companies who desired to outsource their customer service:

• Hired technical writers in order to write simplified usage instructions of their products
• Index the key points of information
• Contracted with temporary employment agencies to search for, train and hire generally low-skilled workers to answer their telephone technical support and customer service calls

The most wide spread method of outsourcing being adopted throughout the world is of call centers. The people employed at the call centers answered the query calls of the customers, where the information needed to assist the calling customer was indexed in a computer system. In most cases the agents were not liable to tell the customers that they were not directly associated with the original manufacturer.

Virtual Events – Capturing More Audience For Your Show

Event organizers are thinking twice about everything these days: how big a space to book, how many hotels rooms to block, even whether to hold the event at all. Never has the cost benefit ratio been under more
scrutiny for meetings and shows of all flavors. That’s why many organizers have turned to the virtual event as a solution. Associations such as the National Association of Broadcasters and the
Case Management Society of America, publishers such as UBM and IDG, and corporations like Symantec and Xerox all have embraced the virtual event in their quest to engage a wider audience. Some
organizations, such as the American Diabetes Association, are even going a step further – in 2009 the association will forgo its on-site event altogether, in favor of a totally virtual event. While thousands of
live events are still alive and well, virtual events are becoming a rapidly growing adjunct to the traditional trade show. Online virtual event vendors such as Performedia, ON24, and Inxpo, are just a few of
these advancing media production companies.
 
In the typical virtual event scenario, keynote and breakout sessions are captured on site on video. If there is an expo hall, a number of vendor exhibits are captured on video as well. The content is bundled
into a virtual event that makes this content available over the web for some number of months after the event is over. The result is that hundreds or even thousands of potential attendees can still participate.
Events that extend themselves through virtualization reap a variety of benefits:

1. Attendees stay connected to the event and the hosting organization, increasing the chances that when time and budget allow they will attend a live event again.
2. Sponsors and exhibitors experience increased traffic and garner new qualified leads via their virtualized booths, helping the organizers recruit new members and/or attendees.
3. The overall flow of information and ideas is vastly expanded, benefiting the event’s industry as a whole.

Here are some things to think about as you prepare to virtualize your event. First, should you try to accomplish this with your in-house staff or outsource? While the prospect of saving money by using existing
staff is certainly attractive, will they be able to handle all the disparate pieces that go into making the event a success online: professional
video capture of sessions and booth demos; an attractive and engaging online event site that provides registration, tracking, payper- view, and social networking capabilities; hosting capacity that can
adequately handle the streaming requirements for such an effort?When polling vendors, be sure to inquire about the following:

1. How turnkey is the solution – will the package offered cover the bulk of the organization’s needs or will there be a complex array of a la carte options to navigate?
2. For session capture, will the multimedia player be limited to simply showing the video of the presenter and their slides? A qualified vendor should be able to capture any visual component of a presentation -  software demos, web tours, etc.
3. Will the content be indexed so online attendees can go right to the items that interest them the most?
4. As for the expo hall – will visitors be able to see the actual  presentation the exhibitor was showing on site?

The bad news is the economy. The good news is that the need for events and the information they collect and pass on has never been greater, and virtualization has arisen as a hard-working analog to the
on-site show. The question is: while you ponder the budgetary crevasses facing your event, will you take the time to consider a bridge not only to better audience and revenue numbers, but a better event
over all.

Peter Hackes is a veteran of the business webcasting industry, having begun distributing business video online in 1996. In 1997 he created the eLearning company LearningStream, and in 2002 founded
Performedia, of which he is President. Performedia is one of the nation’s premiere event virtualization companies, with clients ranging from Samsung to the American Psychological Association to Nielsen.
http://www.performedia.com Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Peter_Hacke