CHICAGO — As laundry and linen services look to move on from the effects of the pandemic, to grow their businesses, they are examining every process in their companies.
That includes their customer service processes.
Without excellent customer service, a laundry would struggle to survive, let alone thrive.
How can an operation evaluate its customer service experience, its overall customer service culture, to improve and grow?
American Laundry News spoke with Shep Hyken, a customer service and experience expert about how customer service has changed and what laundry and linen services can do to evaluate and improve their customer service cultures.
Hyken founded Shepard Presentations in 1983 and has worked with hundreds of clients ranging from Fortune 100-size organizations to companies with less than 50 employees. His articles have been read in hundreds of publications, and he is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author.
In Part 1, Hyken talked about excellent customer service and how customer service has changed. In Part 2, he shared how a laundry operation can evaluate its customer service.
In the conclusion, Hyken talks about ways to improve a laundry’s customer service culture and shares some final thoughts.
After you’ve evaluated your customer service, what if you find it’s lacking? What kind of training do you recommend? How do you improve the customer service culture?
You just said the exact perfect word, “culture.” When you started the question, I thought you were going to ask how to train the people who are on the front line or dealing with vendors.
It’s not about just the front line. It’s about the culture of a company. You know, if everybody in the front line is amazing, but people inside aren’t okay, it’s eventually going to erode the overall experience.
I say customer service is not a department; it’s a philosophy to be embraced by everybody within an organization from the CEO all the way to the most recently hired, lowest-level type of employee that you have. Everybody’s got to be on board.
There are two ways to go about this. No. 1, when you bring on a brand-new employee, get them right into what your culture is. You’ve got to train them to that culture.
There’s some onboarding, but it takes more than that. No. 2, it takes a sustainability program. You’re going to bring it up again and again. Sometimes it’s weekly. Sometimes in some businesses, it’s daily, but it’s an ongoing reminder about service and experience, and we can put customer experience in that same category as well.
It’s philosophical, and the person behind the scenes who thinks that they don’t impact the customer needs to be shown how they impact the customer.
My example is if you work for an airline and you work in the baggage department down underneath the airport. You see the bag come down the conveyor belt. You put it on a cart and it gets out to the airplane. If that customer, that passenger never sees their bag when they end up at the baggage carousel at their destination, I failed the customer.
I also failed an internal customer—the person who the passenger who’s upset, who can’t find their luggage, has to go and see in the baggage office. And nobody walks into that baggage office happy, right? And that person behind the baggage counter is going, “Why could the people just do their job and put the bag on the right plane?”
Everybody supports somebody internally, or part of a process, internally. They all have to be properly trained. I’m going to share with you a six-step process for creating a customer-focused culture, and it’s very simple. Simple doesn’t mean easy, but it’s simple to understand.
No. 1 is you have to define what customer experience, customer service, looks like to your organization. I suggest doing it in one sentence or less. Because if you do it right, and it’s that simple, everybody can remember it and it’s easy.
I’ll give you a great example. The Ritz Carlton has nine words: “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” They have 24 gold standards that drive that line, and when you come to work at the Ritz, part of your initial training are those 24 standards.
No. 2, communicate it over and over again all the time. Put it in front of everyone.
What the Ritz does for sustainability is every day, one of those gold standards is highlighted in their pre-shift meetings, meaning every shift, and that’s easy to do with the hotel industry, because it’s very shift focused. And the manager meets with the team and goes over one of those gold standards, and then everybody goes off to work, 24 days in a row.
At the end of the 24 days, they start over again. And at the end of the year, they estimate that the average employee at the Ritz will have heard this gold standard message, probably about nine to 10 times, which is really important for the sustainability and keeping that message right in front of them.
No. 3, everyone’s trained to it. No. 4, leadership has to be a role model. In other words, they have to treat the people they work with the way customers need to be treated or should be treated. They can’t be incongruent with their behavior.
No. 5 is leadership, management, supervisors, etc., need to be the ones who defend that culture. If they see someone or a department going out of alignment with what that defining statement is that you do in step one, they need to get those people to move back into that alignment.
And, finally, No. 6, celebrate it when it works. If people are doing a good job, let them know they’re doing a good job. If the company overall is trying to create a better experience and you can measure this and say our net promoter score is 45 and we need to get it to 50. If we get it to 50, we’re going to have a pizza party, or whatever, and you hit that number, let everybody know. They’re all on the same team working for the same goal.
Those are the six steps: Define it, communicate it, train to it, be the role model, defend it and celebrate it.
Do you have any final thoughts on customer service for the readers?
We need to unmake our B2B leadership mindset, understand that it’s not much different than B2C anymore. It used to be, but not anymore.
Something I’d like to add is if there’s one thing to remember is that in the B2B world if you lose a customer, it’s not like a customer who walks into the mall. They could walk into the mall 12 times a year and there’s a hundred stores in there and they’re going to buy a T-shirt. They can go to your store, and if you don’t have the right size or what they are looking for in the right color, they just go to another store.
But that doesn’t mean they’re never going to come back to you. The next time they walk in the mall, they’ll probably stop by if they need the same thing and see if you have what it is that they want.
In the B2B world when you lose a customer, it could be a long time. It could be an entire generation before you have a chance to go in and resell that customer that you lost. So, I think it’s really important to understand there’s a generational mistake that costs a company a fortune in the B2B world.
And when it comes to the choices that customers have in the B2B world, oftentimes it’s a much smaller group to choose from and once that customer chooses a company to work with, it’s a little bit harder than in the retail world to steal them away.
Miss Part 1 about excellent customer service and how customer service has changed? Click HERE now to read it? Miss Part 2 on how a laundry operation can evaluate its customer service? Read it by clicking HERE!
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].