Customer Service Skills | Customer Service Essential: Consistency

Customer Service Essential: Consistency

Filed Under Customer Service Essentials | Leave a Comment


As companies grow and the number of employees and departments expand exponentially it becomes a difficult task to get everyone working and thinking in unison. Consistency is one of the most important weapons in the customer service arsenal. Without consistency everything starts falling apart and confusion abounds. Stay consistent on the inside of the business so that you remain consistent on the outside where it’s most important.

Why is consistency so important? Why should we care so much about it? Well, it’s simple. One of the most aggravating complaints a customer can have is: One hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing in this place! When the departments of a business aren’t working together to produce a quality product it drives customer crazy. The customer has to deal with being routed and transferred all around the company in order to get what they are looking for and if one department does one thing and another department does another, it becomes incredibly difficult.

For example: in the hotel industry one of the most common problems is making a reservation. Hotels brands are huge these days, they are worldwide and they have a countless amount of people working for them in different respects. When a customer wants to make a reservation they have a few different options and all of these options must remain consistent with each other.

They can go online through the brand website to make a reservation, they can call central reservations to make the reservation, or they can speak directly to the hotel to make a reservation. If any of these has a different procedure or quotes the customer a different rate than one of the others, the customer is going to pick up on that and wonder what is going on. Consistency makes customer routine easier, it enables the customer to feel that the company is reliable because they work the same way no matter who he is talking to.

Major companies these days are perfect examples of consistency in action. A brand and all the restrictions that come with it are the ultimate consistency mechanisms. Brands lay out a simple easy to follow set of rules for all employees to follow and these rules and procedures are enacted in the same way every time.

The Marriott brand is a great example of consistency. When you step into one Courtyard by Marriott hotel you have practically stepped into them all. Each hotel franchise is built with a specific template and that template is followed across the entire globe with only a few exceptions here and there. Everything from the way the lobby looks, the uniforms the employees wear, to the words each employees uses to speak to you with is consistent world wide and the company is stronger for it.

When the customer knows what to expect with a business, they are more inclined to use that businesses service. The business world is all about trust and disciplined consistency will build that trust in the customer base. However, you want to make sure you are positively consistent and avoid being negatively consistent.

Consistency goes both ways. It can be an essential part in building and strengthening your product but it can also work against you if you’re consistent about the wrong things. Think for a moment about a company that is consistently bad about something. I’ll give you an example from my own personal life.

I used to do my grocery shopping at this one particular store for a while because they usually had low prices. But whenever I would step into the store I would always smell this foul fishy smell. This was brand consistent. No matter which one of these grocery stores I stepped into I would always get smacked by the same odor. I’m not sure why it always smelled that way in these stores but no matter where I was in the country, if I went into these stores they smelled funny like that. I could count on it and that’s why I eventually stopped using the particular store.

You want to be consistent about the positive aspects of your business and be completely inconsistent about the negatives. When you have everyone in your business working together and always working in the same way, you’ll build a reliable brand name for yourself and your customers will know what to expect.

Comments

Leave a Reply