Customer Service Skills Knowledge Base and Frequently Asked Questions
What is management's role in building a customer service corporate culture?
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Quite simply the responsibility for creating and maintaining a customer service oriented culture in any organization must rest with executives, managers and organizational leaders. That's because they have both the power and influence to create such a culture, and only they can make the decisions and communicate the values that are essential to excellent customer service.
Linda Robinson puts it this way:
A customer-first culture starts with management. How clear is their vision of what they want the customer experience to be? How do they treat their people? Are they role models of the level of customer service they expect from others? How vigilant are they in making sure that the values they believe in form the foundation of customer service training? How much training do they give their people? Excellent customer service starts with clarity and commitment of the vision by senior management, role modeling, and training. Without these, customer service excellence cannot exist.
It is the role of management to create a vision of customer service and to communicate it clearly and repeatedly throughout the organization and, in particular, with the customer service representatives. Managers must impact that, buy in, and serve as big mirrors reflecting the customer service quality they expect.
Management's roles and responsibilities are even more important when a company is trying to move from a non-customer service oriented approach to a customer oriented one. Consistency in words and actions is critical, as is the case with any attempts to introduce cultural change. Managers and executives need to be unwavering.
In a company that already has a customer service culture firmly embedded in the minds and hearts of all those that work there, managers and executives can shift into more of a maintenance role.
Robert Bacal is the author of two books on customer service: Perfect Phrases for Customer Service: Hundreds of Tools, Techniques, and Scripts for Handling Any Situation, and Defusing Hostile Customers Workbook. Most of the questions and answers in the Customer Service Knowledgebase (which you are reading now) is based on the material in these books.