If you are looking for a simple and effective way to ensure that your customers receive fantastic service whenever they interact with you and your employees, then look no further than the 6 elements of the Fantastic Service Equation. As an organizational leader, you first task is to understand these six steps and the winning behaviors associated with each step. Then you should practice them each day as you interact with customers and prospects, and finally, you must teach it to all your employees and performance manage them to deliver on each of the elements. The elements of the Fantastic Service Equation are:

• Greet the Customer: When customers come into your organization, when you meet them at theirs or when they call or chat with you online, the first thing you and your employees must do is to offer a warm and pleasant greeting. If it is a face-to-face meeting, rise from your seat, pay attention, and greet with a smile. Use the customer's name if you know it and aim to use names more often than the typical “Sir” and “Ma”. In our traditional African customs, some people expect that you will bow, genuflect or kneel. If you are aware of the customer's customs, feel free to reflect it in your greeting; it helps create an even fonder connection. Some of the things you must avoid are: not paying attention or regarding the customer when they come into your presence, using a stereotyped or robotic greeting, or greeting uninterestedly and just moving on to the “business” of the day.

This “Fantastic Service Board Game”, created by our team of Business Development Experts, is the perfect learning intervention to deploy in training your staff to be excellent at customer service and ensure customer satisfaction.

• Identify the Customer’s Needs: The next step is to take time to find out what the customer wants – you can do this by communicating effectively with the customer: ask questions, seek clarifications, listen effectively, paraphrase the customer's instructions and ensure that you are taking notes carefully. One of the most powerful things you can do in identifying a customer's need is providing a recap of their issues at the end. This helps you and the customer to be crystal clear about what the issues are and guides you to the next step of meeting the customer's needs. Too many people make assumptions at this very important stage of a customer engagement. Our advice – never make any assumptions. Ensure that everything about the customer's request is as clear as possible, and never leave the interaction if you are not certain about any of the issues being discussed.
  
  
• Meet the needs: Now that you are clear about the specific needs of your client, the next step is to develop and implement a solution. One important skill that fantastic service professionals use is to lay-out the solution as steps of activities that they can explain to the customer. So, for example, you could tell the customer, “We will resolve the issue of the erroneous debit by logging it into our system, after which our Auditors will pick up the complaint, investigate it and then request for the operations officer to reverse it. You will receive a text message alert on your phone thereafter, and all of this will happen within the next 24 hours”. By providing the details of your solution in this way customers feel empowered and appreciate how simple and effective your system is in resolving the problem. Another powerful thing that you can do is to get the customer involved in the situation by giving them options for possible solutions. So, you could say: “There are two options available, and we typically allow customers choose for themselves. You may get a response by SMS or via email, and the service personnel may come in the morning or in the afternoon. Which would you prefer? Giving your customers options where possible give them some control over the outcome, which makes them feel involved and empowered.
  
  
• Check the Results: Once you have finished implementing the solution, you should be concerned about its impact on the customer. To ensure that the customer is satisfied you should check results by soliciting feedback from the customer. Checking results also helps you to ensure that all the loose ends are covered and gives you an opportunity to still correct other errors or issues that may have risen in the intervening period. To be effective at checking results, your organization must have very effective systems for getting feedback from customers and your employees must always be concerned about ensuring that customers are satisfied. Some organizations request customers to rate their service all the time like hotels, conference centers and even financial services organizations. These systems ensure that you can always measure the quality of your service and be sure that you have at least met the expectations of your customers. The feedback that this provides can help you to improve service delivery, going forward.

Our “School of Sales and Service Delivery” workshops will help your team learn the skills and techniques of delivering delightful Services, understanding Customer Expectations, transforming Customer Experiences, implementing Consultative Selling, as well as managing Complaints and Irate Customers.

• Make the moments memorable: The Fantastic Service Equation requires you to make each engagement with your customers memorable, by doing something extra for your customers. It may be the kind words of your greeting, a suggestion or advice about something the customer is concerned about, or your help with the customer's bags or other ways of making the customer more comfortable. Cab drivers provide a selection of different genres of music CDs for you to choose from or ask you what type of radio station you will like to listen to; some even offer sweets, cotton buds, a charger for your run-down phone battery, or the day's newspaper as means of making you more comfortable. You too can be as creative as these cab drivers in making the moments memorable for your customers.
  
  
• Leave the Door Open: This final element of the Fantastic Service Equation challenges us to create a window of opportunity to get the customer to come back to us. Offer the customer some exciting new products, get their contact details and key them into the various platforms of your customer relationship management system, invite them for some special business events that you have, find out what more you can do for them and most importantly - thank them for their patronage and invite them back to your business. The air hostesses do an amazing job when they say “Thank you for flying Be Better Airways, we know that you have a number of other options for your travel, and we are grateful for choosing us today…you can find out more about our new routes to Dubai and how you can check-in online and avoid rushing to the airport by visiting our website at www.bebetterairways.com”. You too can create a closing line that you and your employees use in all your service encounters – one that reminds them of the quality experience they have received (hopefully), thanks them, and offers them some more useful stuff from your organization. Imagine getting this type of closing line from the local supermarket in your neighborhood. Add that to good prices and quality products and you will be back there all the time!

Delivering fantastic service to your customers is not something that happens by mere stroke of luck. As an organizational leader, you and your employees must be deliberate about ensuring that your customers receive fantastic service each time. The six steps/elements of the Fantastic Service Equation will help you deliver consistent fantastic service to your customers and create a culture of great service that will keep the cash register ringing.

If you want to further enhance your customer experience skills, we have developed this online course on “How to Create a Winning Service Strategy”, to assist you with learning the frameworks to identify customer expectations; mapping out service touchpoints and integrate them to create a winning service strategy for your business.