Many of our clients put their heart and soul into providing a great customer service, but too many obstacles keep preventing them from achieving this rewarding goal.

Excelling at customer service requires a whole-of-company effort with everyone ‘reading off the same page'. It relies on timely, accurate information from external customers regarding their needs; in addition to cooperation from suppliers where information/services/goods are also exchanged in a timely, accurate manner.

A good place to start looking to improve customer service is your own backyard. Internal operational challenges and issues can prevent a company from achieving targets for revenue, cost containment and profit, because these challenges and issues have a direct impact on customer service and company reputation.

L&SC Strategies' proven process improvement methods are focussed on protecting the reputation of your organisation by addressing customer service processes that are causing significant issues and delays for your external customers and internal departments. Is it time to plug those leaks, get those customers back, retain current patronage and address the delay issues?

Here's a simple example how L&SC Strategies have assisted clients to improve customer service by investigating and addressing operational and supply chain challenges and issues.

Step 1: Identify customer types and where to investigate

• Understand who your customers are and how you serve them
• Identify internal customers and external customers
• Understand whether you use different customer service processes to serve each customer type
• Understand the issues and opportunities relevant to each customer type
• Focus on improving the customer service process relevant to each customer type

Step 2: Conduct internal and external customer satisfaction interviews

• Really get to know your customers well, their likes, dislikes, irritations, wishes and preferences
• Identify issues, risks and the significance of issues and risks from the customer's perspective (both internal and external)
• Identify issues and risks common to all customer types and related processes
• Identify the customer's level of satisfaction (are they happy or are they walking)
• Identify improvement opportunities
• Identify business opportunities

Step 3: Process map each customer service process requiring improvement

• Fully understand each step in each customer service process from a people, process, technology perspective
• Fully understand the current state of each customer service process requiring improvement
• Identify and flag where the issues are occurring

Step 4: Measure the current state performance of each customer service process

• Identify the current level of performance in comparison to what you need it to be at that point in time
• Identify which performance is meeting your targets
• Identify the extent of performance gaps that need to be addressed
• Align customer satisfaction responses with performance results

Step 5: Benchmark against similar ‘best practice' companies

• Understand why other similar ‘best practice' companies are operating at ‘best practice'
• Learn from their ‘learnings' and efficiency successes regarding similar issues that your company encounters
• Identify what improvements can your company adopt to achieve similar success

Step 6: Identify improvement opportunities for each customer service process

• Improve customer service processes that result in retaining existing customers and attracting new customers
• Increase the capacity of the company to be able to serve more customers to increase revenue
• Create the future state of each customer service process that will result in:
  • Increased productivity, capability and performance
  • Maximised efficiency, effectiveness and customer service 
  • Increased revenue, reduced/optimised costs and increased profit margin
  • Improved staff morale

Step 7: Develop an implementation plan

• Project plan how improvements will be implemented over a period of time in order of priority
• Identify requirements for resources, timing, equipment, purchases, training and cost of implementation
• Identify the impact of improvements on other departments and stakeholders, and on customers both internal and external

Step 8: Establish a 6 month performance measurement and improvement plan

• Establish incremental performance targets per month to maintain the momentum and focus on continuous improvement
• Illustrate how your improvements will improve each performance area over a period of time
• Focus the project team on achieving these performance targets
• Illustrate to senior management and shareholders the return on investment in the improvement project

Step 9: Conduct ongoing Customer Satisfaction Surveys

• Identify whether internal customers and external customers are happier with the service
• Identify level of satisfaction and whether service has improved and how it has improved
• Identify what else needs improving
• Promote customer service improvements
• Increase patronage from existing customers and new customers

Step 10: Embed a continuous improvement culture within the organisation

• Meet your customer's needs and wants in a timely manner
• Ensure improvements are made on a daily basis
• Ensure process issues are brought to management's attention when they occur
• Ensure issues and opportunities are addressed in timely manner, so that taking immediate and corrective action results in excellent returns

The above steps provide you with the guidance necessary to improve your customer service.

While these steps are simple enough, L&SC Strategies' experience suggests that organisations either don't have the skills internally to facilitate these steps or don't have the time.

L&SC Strategies can facilitate customer service improvements with your team or we can provide professional mentoring to those responsible for improving customer service.

If customer service is an issue and you need assistance on how to get going, call us now on 07 4927 5433 or email Sharyn Grant, Managing Director at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .