10 key factors crucial to building service quality

Reliability

Your ability to provide consistent and reliable service. You get it done right the first time. And you always honor your promises.

Responsiveness

You provide service in a timely fashion. And timely is a perception defined by your customers. To be responsive, it’s essential you understand your customers’ needs, goals or problems. Once you do, you must be appropriately responsive.

Competence

You have the knowledge and skill level to perform the service, and a surefire way to deliver it, on time and as expected. Competence is characterized by sound judgment and intelligent decisions. Customers like to do business with smart businesspeople who act like winners.

Accessibility

How accessible or approachable are you and your people? Are you easy to reach? Or are your customers always stuck in a relentless game of phone, fax, pager, letter and e-mail tag?

Are customers continually being transferred from one person to another? Do they have to search your store or office to find you or anyone else who might help them?

Customers are typically reasonable and patient people, but extended waiting or delays on a regular basis usually causes them to search for another individual or company who promptly and efficiently solves their problems.

Courtesy

Courtesy means you’re polite, considerate and understanding of your customers and your fellow employees.

Courtesy includes respect for property – not just your customers’, but yours, meaning you treat your products, merchandise, samples, display areas and support materials as prized possessions. Why? Because if your customers sense you don’t care about your things, they’ll begin to wonder how you’ll treat them and their things.

Communication

Here, you keep customers informed in language they understand. Listen to your customers. Help educate them. Never forget, information is only of value to your customers if they know about it and understand it.

Credibility

Your word is your bond. Customers know you’re trustworthy and believable. If you say it, it’s gospel. If you do it, it’s done right. Remember, it takes years to develop your reputation but only seconds to lose it. To achieve your desired results and goals, first help your customers achieve theirs.

Security

Here, you and your people, (along with your products or services) provide customers with a comfort zone or peace of mind. They’re assured of performance and results. You remove the risk. Remember, customers want to maximize gain and minimize or eliminate loss.

Understanding

Make a sincere effort to understand your customers’ needs, goals and objectives. Learn their requirements. Provide individualized or customized attention. And always recognize and acknowledge by name your regular, loyal and repeat customers.

Tangibles

Concentrate on the image being conveyed by your company, products, services, physical facilities, promotional materials and especially you and your people. Like it or not, this stuff matters.

Are these 10 dimensions of service easy to find in any company? How about your company? How about you? Do you successfully deliver all 10 dimensions? If not, which ones do you deliver? How often? Are you missing any? Are you weak in any of them? Where will you improve?

To be competitive, you can’t rest upon your laurels. Acceptance, comfort and complacency breed mediocrity. Today, demanding consumers expect quality, value and service. And with each purchase or decision, they vote ... with their money. It’s your job to make sure they don’t switch their votes.

Jeff Blackman is a speaker, author, success coach, broadcaster and lawyer based in Illinois. His clients call him a “business-growth specialist.”

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