Good customer service starts at the top of organisations. The CEO or business leader must set the tone for the direction, control, and accountability of sound customer service. This should not be a ‘lip-service’ exercise.

The CEO should be visibly committed to customer service and require all the senior management team to embrace the concept. Customer service should be integral to the products or services offered by the organisation.

Customer service should be central to all new products launches and ideally built into the design planning stages. Clear understanding of the important channels for internal communication should be considered.

All managers should be assessed on clear customer service outcomes. This requirement should ideally fall within a range of corporate and individual key performance measures.

All staff will require training and appreciation of the new customer service strategy and monitoring programmes should be considered.

Employees should understand the importance of customer service and what it means to the enterprise. Indeed, the consequences of failure to live up to required customer service standards should be articulated.

It is important to ensure the culture of the organisation supports good customer service. A poor or negative culture will not assist in the promotion of customer service excellence.

By utilising BS8477 the British Standard for Customer Service an organisation can be assured of using the best in class framework for benchmarking existing arrangements and seeking improvements.

An organisation seeking customer service excellence can progress towards BSI’s Customer Service Kitemark. The author of this blog is qualified to advise on this framework.

For further information and to book your BS 8477 – Customer Service survey please contact: Marcus J Allen at Thamer James Ltd. Email: [email protected]

Marcus has twenty years’ experience in delivering Governance, Risk and Compliance solutions to over two hundred organisations within the UK. Marcus holds the respected Diploma in Governance, Risk and Compliance from the International Compliance Association and holds a master’s degree in Management Learning & Change from the University of Bristol. Marcus is a Fellow of the Institute of Consultants and Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute.