Eight Principles of Customer Service

With the existing competing around the world business enterprises are coming up with ways they can attract their customers. Good customer service can be good in building a relationship with your customers. To achieve one need to thank their customers while at the same time promoting a positive and helpful environment that will ensure you have positively impressed your customers. Due to this companies and business entities have been coming out with different trends of customer service so that they ensure they maintain their customers.

Principles of customer service

 In any field either business, company or an institution they are usually guided by the principle of customer service. According to Michelli (2008), these principles help them improve the services and maintain a good relationship with their customers. Here are some of the principles of customer services that are core in any business or company. Through the core services, customer service techniques will govern the organization of the quality of service. In this paper, we will discuss the eight principles of customer service that is key in every institution. According to Pascal, (2018) they include; speed, accuracy, clarity, transparency, accessibility, friendliness and efficiency.

Speed

 This has been critical to many organizations. Through speed and responsiveness, it will determine the quality of service provided in an institution. As one may know, the ability to respond to the customer need has an impact on both the customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction. For companies to improve on their customer service, they ensure they have good responsiveness (Vickery et al., 530). There are various types of responsiveness which include first responsive time, average and problem solution time. All of these differ it regarding speed, but the best way to respond to clients is using the first responsive time where the customers receive a quick response to the or clients.

Accuracy

This is also another principle of customer service. Besides being fast in delivering information to the clients the information provided should be correct. If any information provided to the customer is not accurate, this can lead to dissatisfaction (Molino, Huaixiu & Yi-Chia, 14). The organization should always ensure they contain information that is accurate. To ensure this is done in the right way is to train your employees on the crucial part of accuracy. The training should much be focused on the skill, train for the efficiency in expanding knowledge. Teamwork should also be critical as it will solve the issue of a dependent through colleagues.

Clarity

 Another principle involves clarity; this is how information can be processed. This is what and how information should be provided. Simplicity is the mother of clarity, but it has always never received the respect it deserves. Employees talking simply to the clients is always not easy as it requires less mental effort to process the same information. The organization should always ensure they have a structure to ensure they increase the processing of fluency.

Transparency

Companies need to ensure they have customer loyalty. Always companies should make sure they are transparent to their clients. When one is transparent, it means that they are accountable and open on all the policies and programs of the company (Glance, Andrew & Turner, 245). Whenever communicating to the client, customer care representative should also ensure they are as more transparent as possible.

Accessibility

This principle is always fundamental especially when the client has a complaint or an issue and they want to get in touch with the institution. Many organizations have ever worked hard to ensure they focus on delighting the customer; however, nowadays institution is more focused on providing they reduce the customer effort. When service performance and costs are increasing customer, satisfaction is also increased. For the principle of accessibility to be successful the institution should always be accessible at all time (Menguc et al., 430). Despite being expensive, the customer service should always be available 24/7. However, to ensure this is reduced companies have come up with the services where clients can have self-service options, a situation they can handle the problem by themselves.

Friendliness

Customer services should always be friendly to the client no matter the issue raised. There should be a human-to-human approach whenever delaying with clients. Human interaction may be of nuisance and may have both the negative and positive impact on the experience. It may be impossible to train employees on being polite and friendly. They may have it or not; however, when hiring employees, the employer should always be keen. Being friendly makes the customer feel good.

Efficiency

 Finally, we have the principle of efficiency. For a company to have the best service globally they should have efficiency as one of the crucial factors in customer service due to the advancement in technology there have been tools used that have bypassed the yesterday tradeoffs. With email messaging, voice mail use of phone and the live chat it has improved the efficiency used in today world of communicating to clients.

Importance of customer service principles

The above principles are really critical to the business world today. They are really necessary due to the current completion available in the market from clients and customers. Any company is competing for customer loans and customer loyalty (Weinstein & Donovan, 14). When the above principles are met chances are customers will be right next to your door. The important part of customer care service is that it will be keeping clients once you have brought them to your business. Through the service, it will be built trust to your customers. With the current competition available, it is hard to build trust in customers. In any business customers should be the priority more than the price if having them. In this case, the above principles will ensure they put customers first more than anything else.

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Additionally, it will build the brand of the company. Your company will be seen to be customer oriented and not price oriented which is good or business. Finally, with good customer care service and having filled the above principles it will reduce problems that are associated with the business. There is no way a business will have perfect customers but with the above principles will ensure customers issues are handled in a more conformable manner.

Having seen the positive side of having customer care, there is also the negative side of customer care services. When you have a bad customer care service, this will hurt your business. whenever you have customer care services that are rude to the clients, it will damage your reputation as a company. Your company will be seen to be “bad and customers will never want to be associated with you.” Secondly, it may also lead to the dropping of the value of lifetime customers. Having new customers can be very expensive compared to having your current customers. Clients are usually willing to move in case they have a good experience and will always want to do more business with you. Not only will you lose the customers, but the chances of also losing the employees are also very high. Some employees may leave the job whenever they notice the company has bad customer service. This, in turn, may lead to turnout on people that you rely on running your business. To ensure the adverse effect of customer service is always providing you have the best customer care services.

Below we will look at two different organization one public and the other one private to see how they handle their customers through their customer services strategies. The companies include Rolls Royce and Home bargains, using them we will see some of the strategies they use to ensure they attract and retain their customers.

Rolls Royce

 This is a British luxury automobile maker. The company is a public limited company, established in 1998 the company was licensed with the rights of making Roll-Royce as the brand name of the company (Johnson 140). Its main headquarters is based in Goodwood, England in the United Kingdom. The company sells its luxurious vehicles all over the world. The CEO of the company is Torsten Mullier. It provides services if Automobile customization. Currently, the company has more than 1300 employees located globally. Its sales have increased over the years. In 2005, it had made 796 sales compared to 2016 where it made 4011 sales (Johnson 141). The company has dramatically increased its sales all over the world with many sales comings from the Asia Pacific. The company targets people that have a liquid asset of more than $30 million. It only targets countries that have developed mainly dealing with rich people. Not everyone can afford the Roll Royce vehicle as they are considered to be extremely expensive as they can reach up to $450,000 or even more depending on the need of the client.

  Due to the amount of money required in purchasing the automobile the company has also come up with a different customer care approach that matches their customer’s needs.  According to Roll Royce (2015), their customer care is not located everywhere around the globe but some specific regions globally, for instance, they have customer care regions in the Asia Pacific, America, Europe, Great China, middle east and Africa. They are customer care centers that are located in the different areas globally so that they can provide with services that customers can understand their needs with support sales campaign and a lead customer account management. From their website, there is no any customer care services compared to other sites where you can have a live chat talking to clients asking them “How can we help you?”.

  The class is what that speak whenever one wants to buy an automobile from Roll Royce you have to have a lot of money so that they can talk to you about what they are selling. Therefore, they have unique customer care services that are aimed only to these types of people. For them to attract new customers, they have use customer care services that are located in the above regions provided above. However, they also use some airlines company primarily in the Asian Pacific region, places where they know they can get new clients. Airlines that have class are the ones used by the company as they know they will get new clients from there.

 One advantage of these methods is that is not that much expensive. They will pay these companies money enabling them to market themselves. It will also allow meeting the target population very quickly compared to other methods where they target the general public. Using this method of customer care service may also not work as there may be someone in regions that are much far from their regional office and they have the capability of buying the automobile. This may make them not get clients due to lack of customer care services in regions where these people are located.

Home Bargains

 The second company is Home Bargains. This is a private limited company based in Old Swan Liverpool, England. Formerly it was known as Home and Bargains but later changed to the current Home Bargains. Generally, it deals with grocery and general merchandise. The owner is TJ Moris who owns several companies such as the Far Eastern Ventures. The company has employed more than 17,000 employees operating at a net income of more than 100 million Euros.

 The company has the customer service skills of adaptability in using the online platform. Compared to Roll Royce, Home Bargains have an online platform where clients can be able to communicate with their clients. Street (2017) believes that they have the Home Bargains help center where they have provided their emails and their number with the resolver. From the website, they have indicated “Whenever you need help to let us know.” This is a good move especially when you have a stubborn customer as they will have tailored solutions from the employees. The company has also utilized social media as a platform where they can communicate with its clients. Through this, the company is able to meet its clients need and solve issues that may arise as a result of complaints or any other issue at the course of the company offering its services. One advantage is that they will many clients need on a platform that is well recognized by many customers such as social media. They also have a website where customers can purchase products throughout the platform. This has helped the company improve in its revenue. However, the company does not have a call center as they have indicated they need to keep the prices low. One limitation is lack of innovation in having the live chat technology on its website. Through it, they might have increased the number of clients.

Conclusion

Different company has different ways of engaging their customers. Other don’t have platforms that their clients can quickly reach them due to the value of the products they are selling. A good example provided is Roll Royce. This is all the same with companies that sell aeroplanes, and they need to advertise and have customer care services in certain place and not all places. This will help as they will not waste time and resources to advertise products to people that don’t have enough capital to purchase their products. However, to companies that everyone can purchase products, they should have platforms that the common man can easily reach them. All the seven principles of customer care services are applicable in both scenarios and should be used accordingly.

Work cited

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Johnson, Sheena, et al. “Wellbeing and Resilience at Rolls-Royce.” WELL-BEING. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2018. 139-147.

Michelli, J. A. The new gold standard: 5 leadership principles for creating a legendary customer experience courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. McGraw-Hill, 2008.

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Weinstein, Art T., and Donovan A. McFarlane. “How libraries can enhance customer service by implementing a customer value mindset.” International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing 22.1 (2017): e1571.