Champion Cleaners

I believe one of the most important aspects of growing a business in good times and difficult times is good customer service. I know it sounds simple right, maybe not. I think good customer service is much more than doing a good job it is also about how we treat a costumer from the moment they walk in our doors. The old adage “treat others as you would like to be treated” has never been truer.  I don’t know about you but I hate bad customer service, it annoys me when I think I am being treated badly. So with that in mind I began to think about the type of service I expected and how I could take that information and implement it into my own company’s value and procedures.

The first thing I noted was that I hate to contact a business either in person or via the phone and be treated as if I am somehow an inconvenience. You know what I am talking about, you walk up to a counter and the person behind the counter neither welcomes you nor appears to care about the fact that you are there to bring them business. A simple smile and welcome goes a long way. This is the first point of contact, how much business is lost because of lack of courtesy.

Once I recognized this, I had to ask myself how my business was managing our initial customer contact and I was horrified to note that we were not doing nearly as good as I expected to receive from other businesses.  Instead of jumping in and reprimanding my employee’s I decided to take a few days and watch how my staff was not only relating to the public but also to management as well as each other. What an educational couple of days, I do want to go on record and say human behavior is complicated and I must admit to a moment of pure fright. I was not sure if I would be able to make the changes that I believed need to be changed, I mean couldn’t I just stomp around and yell for a few minutes and make it all go away…. No, it was not going to be that easy.

When I mentioned that this had been an educational couple of days I wasn’t kidding. The truth is is that it confirmed beliefs that I had always maintained and was clearly not doing.  The key to good customer service starts with the owner/manager of the business, how we as management treat our staff determines the type of day our employees will have and thus our customers. Courtesy is a two way street and it starts at the top hence creating an environment that is friendly, fun, and supportive is imperative. One of the first things I did was bring my staff together, not under the guise of fault find but mostly to share with them some of the things that I had learned and reaffirmed about myself. We than went on to discussing ways in which, as a team, we could improve our customer service. I am not going to tell you that this all went smooth and easy, we had a few bumps in the road but we stuck to it and are continuing to stick to it and I would like to say that we are improving every day…