Blog posts tagged appraisal

It’s Customer Service Week....so what?

If you have a really well run business with customers at the heart of everything you do I believe that should be, and is, a perfectly understandable reaction.  In all seriousness, I do think that National Customer Service Week is a really good idea, but I would liken it to the annual employee appraisals that exist in many large businesses.  When conducted properly, the annual appraisal should be a reflection and written confirmation of all the activity that has gone on in the past year.  Sadly that is often not the case and the first an employee hears of their good performance or areas for development is at their annual appraisal.  Similarly Customer Service Week, in a well run business, should be an opportunity to reflect and celebrate all the excellent service that the business has been delivering over the last year and not a focus on its customer service for one of the 52 weeks of the year. 

There is lots to celebrate, too.  Last week I was involved in the judging of the annual WOW! Awards for customer service and one of my categories was small business.  I was really taken with how responsive and caring these businesses were and how they were using the benefits of their relatively unstructured systems to do what was best for their customers either collectively or individually.  Many of the larger businesses I work with would really struggle to deliver the individual attention to detail these finalists were demonstrating.

So, one way in which you might approach this week is to concentrate on identifying all the really good things you do for customers and celebrating them with your employees.  It’s very easy in a busy pressurised environment to feel that customer service is just ‘doing your job’ but using this week to take the time to recognise and celebrate your achievements could deliver great benefits for many weeks to come.  Who knows, you might even enjoy it so much that it becomes a feature of every week of the year, just like a well managed annual appraisal. 

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