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You are here: Home / Customer Service / Customer Service – A Compass will help the Team find their way

Customer Service – A Compass will help the Team find their way

March 18, 2011 By mco Leave a Comment

Having and executing a plan are key puzzle pieces linked to solid metrics and great communication. A Compass will help the Team find their way.

In John Grissom’s The Client, attorney Reggie Love wears a compass around her neck. A recovering alcoholic and pill user, Love explains, “So I’ll never lose my way again.”

Success is a science, not a mystery.

A compass is a powerful symbol, often used in books and movies,” A red rider BB gun with a compass in the stock” – A Christmas Story

The lost compass and his job as a map maker are interesting story threads in – Lawrence of Arabia and The Rose Line in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code

All compass related. The compass, a rose compass was a popular tattoo with early sailors.

Disney uses a compass as part of their customer service training. They use the North, South, East and West as directional points to chart a common purpose for Service. Knowing and understanding your customers requires a different level of service than most organizations invoke regularly.

Bringing customer service to life involves a vision at Disney it encompasses the following:

• “99 or one percent rule”
• Long Shot and the close up
• Timelessness and timeliness.
• Not compliance, go the extra mile.

Customer/Guest demographics are a significant portion of sales service. Disney knows where their customers come from, the average party size, the average stay, the frequency of visits and per capita spending patterns. What do we know about our customers? Customer service can help gather intelligence and begin to analyze it. Once we begin to know our customers then we can begin to understand them; in the study of customers these areas maybe shown as:

• Knowledge of our customers – Demographics
• Understanding our customers – Psychographics

Psychographics is a study of variables, of any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles. They are also called IAO variables (for Interests, Activities, and Opinions). Psychographics is the study of personality, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles.

The Compass points, traditionally labeled North, South, East and West become N – needs, S – stereotype, E – emotions and W – wants.

In our case needs are situational, customers are requiring a product or a service . Wants must be our desire to exceed customer expectations. “Stereotype” is the image; we want many people to have of our TEAM. Appearance, professional, presentation and responsiveness are the image we want people to have when they think about our TEAM. Measuring emotions is a key to great customer service and more difficult to track. We must train and develop our team to deal with the range of customer emotions and channel them all towards extremely satisfied.

Marketing needs to be intelligent, authentic, provide a number of viewpoints and Value. Demographics and Psychographics are tools to frame the outcome. Remember the line in Boiler Room? “A sale is made on every call, either you sell him or he sells you on a reason he can’t.” Outcomes become more predictable with plans, plans are honed with data and both are best served with a compass charted route and practice.

A Compass will help the Team find their way; Teamwork wins, having and executing a plan are key puzzle pieces linked to solid metrics and great communication.

All the runners in a race compete, only one wins. Run to Win.

Do you have a comment or a story you can share, please do so below. Thanks!

Filed Under: Customer Service Tagged With: Customer Service, marketing, strategic planning

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