Leadership starts at the top. An effective leader can inspire their team to embody the values and qualities that represent their brand. It is key to creating a culture of service excellence. SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL helps team leaders to articulate, implement, and develop a values-driven approach that enables a brand-aligned customer experience.
In this article, we’ll look at some of the focus areas to achieve a culture of service excellence.
Define and Live your Values
The first step towards service excellence is to define the values you want your customers to resonate with and experience. The SERVICEBRAND approach focuses on clarifying the organization’s purpose and values as a foundation for brand identity.
Values-driven leadership consciously references this purpose and values to guide decisions and behaviours. Bringing these values to life in leadership style allows employees to experience the culture as part of their everyday work. In turn, your employees will represent these behaviours to your customers. Leaders cannot delegate values and culture.
Create a Service Excellence Culture
Excellent service achieved when excellence runs through everything the organization does. Leadership funnels through to customer-facing team members. Developing clear customer satisfaction goals that outline each employee’s expectations is a crucial step towards achieving a sustained service excellence culture. You are only as good as the last customer experience you deliver.
Communicate Clearly and Consistently
You can earn trust with customers by communicating clearly and consistently. Provide contact information and a point of contact at your company, so customers know who to reach out to with questions or concerns. Ensure consistent language and standards irrespective of time, geography, or channel.
Transparency instills trust amongst clients and customers. Everything from pricing, products, delivery schedules, and other aspects should be treated honestly. Your customers are potentially your marketing department.
Engage your Employees
Your employees are, in effect, your organization, and their behavior will influence how customers perceive your organization. Leaders need to make continuous efforts to increase employee engagement because Research indicates that there is a direct correlation between engaged employees and the satisfaction of your customer and ultimately achieving your business outcomes. In other words, employee engagement drives customer satisfaction.
Values-based recruitment can help to place the right candidates in the right roles. Recognition and regular feedback are also vital to keeping employees engaged. Your employees’ behaviour can enhance your brand or not.
Invest in Continuous Personal Development
Leadership styles are continually changing as the paradigm of work changes. SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL appreciates that the relentless pace of change is rendering skills and knowledge as increasingly transient assets. Values and authentic emotional connection are the only sustainable foundation. We believe that leaders who are curious and eager to learn while remaining true to their values will be the ones who stand the best chance for success. The most substantial investment you can make is an investment in yourself.
Make it Personal
Great leaders communicate their expectations. They also monitor performance. For this, leaders need to leave their offices and personally interact with employees and customers. When we enjoyed leadership roles in the hospitality sector, the best way to find out what was happening was to ask customers and employees personally. This habit of showing personal attention in a highly visible way demonstrates a strong level of commitment. You carry your leadership shadow wherever you go, so use it to create positive power.
Be Proactive with Problem Resolution
It is the real world, and sometimes things will not go as well as you would have wanted. What is more important than what happened in the first place is how the situation dealt. Effective problem resolution can result in a customer who is more loyal than they were previously. The other key element is to identify the cause of the problem and prevent it from happening again. For this reason, customer feedback is invaluable. If you do not know that something is wrong, you cannot put it right.
See Customers as your Ambassadors
Customers are more than today’s numbers. Your brand’s values help to engage customers on an emotional level and can lead to long-lasting relationships. Celebrate this loyalty to turn customers into the best brand ambassadors. Organizations are no longer what they say they are, but, instead, what others say they are.
Use the 31Practices Approach
SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL knows that values-driven leadership based on instilling the right decisions and behaviours. The 31Practices approach helps bring to life your company values for both leaders and employees. This award-winning approach promotes congruent behaviour and a greater sense of fulfilment. We take a bespoke approach for each organization to co-create its own unique set of 31Practices that explicitly connected to the organization’s values.
That is why brand identity is a pillar SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL uses to help businesses provide values-driven leadership and create a service excellence culture. Your brand is the way your employees behave every single day.
Culture from the Top-down and the Bottom-up
Get in touch with SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL for a consultation on how we can help you develop better habits. Our passion is to see authentic service organisations thrive and flourish in the new paradigm of what we refer to as the Values Economy. We do this by helping progressive leaders to design, implement, and improve a brand-aligned customer experience delivered by their employees (brand ambassadors). Our SERVICEBRAND approach helps to realise synergies, avoid duplication, and eliminate waste. It has been applied successfully on an individual business unit, a national and global basis, to deliver remarkable sustained improvement across a range of business measures (client/customer and employee experience, engagement and advocacy, sales, and profit).