Today, the service front is increasingly challenging along with a myriad of business disruptions and innovations are commonplace. Technology such as digital platforms offer businesses new channels to compete and further requiring the workforce to be ever more adaptive to customers’ needs and delivering a more seamless service experience.
How can you take ownership of growing yourself as a service professional?
Continuous learning of the current and emerging applications needed for service operations is perhaps an excellent starting point. Nonetheless, take a few steps back before your journey of service learning. Reflect what matters to you most, in other words, look inside yourself and find your goal and purpose of what you aspire to be. The critical part is your motivation to succeed as a service professional comes from the very first step of cultivating a positive mindset shift.
Think of yourself that you have a strong ‘can do’ spirit to adapt and improvise when given with limited resources.
In the popular MacGyver TV series, the fictional character, MacGyver works as a super-resourceful secret agent able to solve a range of problems through improvisations and inventive use of everyday items where he always carries a Swiss Army knife and a roll of duct tape.
Taking inspiration from MacGyver, search for improvisation opportunity to delight the customer and treat every challenge with optimism as there will always be a ‘work around’ path or method or solution to the problem.
See Challenges as Opportunities to Improvise
1. Engage your customer with empathy
Use your empathy to listen actively to the pain points during the encounter and observe any details that can shed more light. These details could lead to insights in deriving potential solutions. Be open to using technology and resources that are in your control when engaging the customer during the service challenge.
2. Run through the ‘damage report’, and ‘review’ at the service gap.
Go through how significant the unexpected challenge truly is and its degree of impact. The objective here is to have a deeper understanding of the circumstances of the problem before jumping into ‘fixing it’ that may have other implications.
3. ‘MacGyver’ your service resources to delight your customer
Leverage on your service resource – technology applications, operational resources and even rope in co-workers when improvising solutions for the challenge. Communicate with clarity and succinctly when executing the solution for the problem. Make your customer feel special for the service experience even during this stage of recovery.
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job, every day to make every important aspect of the customer service a little bit better” – Jeff Bezos
The takeaway
By demonstrating that you feel their pain point during your engagement, and take action with swift improvisation of the solution will earn you a massive mileage in winning your customer’s confidence, and in turn their trust in your service excellence.
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