Get Your Business Noticed – The Service Approach Barry

Every company, large or small, needs to be known. Even for non-commercial organisations like charities, hospitals and local authorities the desire to be recognised and respected in their local community is obvious.

What you need to do is make sure you are noticed for all the right reasons, rather than being remembered for any negatives. And don’t forget it’s easier for people to remember and talk about the things that go wrong, than it is for them to praise you for perfection.

There is a simple approach that can get you noticed for all the right reasons - The Service Approach.

Deliver excellent service, every time. Very easy to say and very difficult to achieve. But if you build into your business an ethos of quality, and encourage a full time, permanent focus on the customer you’ll be well on the way to delivering the service approach, every time.

Here are two practical measures you can take to improve service – and they are not perhaps the most obvious ones.

1. Recruitment, selection and induction

A thorough recruitment and selection process will deliver the right type of candidates for your business. This is your opportunity to check out things like attitude, commitment and ‘fit’ with your business philosophy. If you haven’t decided what that philosophy is you might come un-stuck.

But even those you’ve hand picked will need some help and guidance on what you expect within your business. So, make sure all staff receive a thorough induction to the company – and certainly one that goes beyond telling them where the coffee machine is and what to do if there’s a fire alarm. Not that these things aren’t important – after all you want to be sure that any customers, suppliers or partners are offered refreshments when they visit, and that they don’t get left behind of there’s a fire drill. But of more importance is making all staff aware of your standards of business. Letting them know what’s expected of them, in terms of the way they behave, the way they deal with customers and the way you want the company referred to. Let them know your standards, whether that is product quality or service standards, for telephone answering, or the way visitors are greeted in reception. And don’t take anything for granted, all organisations are different, you shouldn’t be afraid to set specific standards for yours.

2. Complaints

The first thing is don’t do anything that can be avoided, to cause complaints. But let’s be realistic, that’s not easy, customers can be very demanding and sometimes even downright unreasonable. So make sure you have a simple, and customer centric complaints procedure.

Customer centric – it should be about solving the customer’s problem, not about apportioning blame, passing the buck or saving face.

In research, customers who’ve had a compl...

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