Speaker 1: Hi, this is Brenda with Cooper Hamilton Company, and I'm just briefly on this snippet going to talk about accountability and why monitoring your customer service performance levels on a consistent and systematic basis is important. So let's go ahead and get through the first slide. Thank you. It's important to have a high level of service culture in your organization because that leads to excelling in customer service. As we'll see with some other slides and some other programs that we offer, if you choose to go through them, that having an excellent customer service performance culture in your organization will generally, studies have suggested that you will then have increased customer loyalty, they'll buy more, you don't have to constantly be turning and finding new customers, word of mouth, it's just a very beneficial thing. So it's important to have excellent customer service because of customer loyalty and also because of employee longevity. As you can see, there's a correlation between customer loyalty and employee longevity, which will certainly make your business quite a bit more profitable. But in order to do all of that, it starts with some baby steps, and the first step, which is often not paid as much attention to as it should be, is the accountability and holding everyone's, so to speak, feet to the fire on the accountability of how well they're doing in customer service, not only for your external customers, but also your internal customers. So let's go on and look at the next slide. As you can see, accountability through monitoring your customer service performance, it will vary between departments or employees or whomever you want to monitor, but one thing you need to be aware of, and that it is a process, it's an ongoing process, monitoring your customer service performance. It's not a project that you walk in one day and say, let's do this, and you have it done, and then you wait maybe six more months and you have it done again. It has to be an ongoing process. HR has to be involved in it. All of your department heads should be involved in this because it's important that every department understand their role in customer service. As you can see, it's an ongoing process. You have to determine expectations. What might be an expectation for one department might be different for another. However, there is and should be a general expectation that should hold true for all departments and all employees. You want to find the gaps when you do your monitoring, and then you want to work with your appropriate people to fill in those gaps. You want to have it on a frequent basis. You want to determine the value, and everyone needs to believe and know that there is a value in this process and look at it as a favorable feedback, not as some sort of punitive type of process. So that gives you an idea of some of the roles and some of the actions that you need to take in order to start this process. This is a very small snippet. There's a lot that goes into this. We'd be happy to talk to you a little bit more about this. Feel free to give us a call. You need to determine who is going to be monitored on a monthly basis, on a weekly basis. Again, the frequency could vary. The questions you're going to be, or the items you're looking for could vary. It depends. It's going to require some conversation and find out the expectations, who's going to be monitored, what is the scoring system, how are you going to score that, what's the reward and recognition that goes along with that, and what actions for improvement would we look at and consider if we find that the scoring level is below what we determined should be an acceptable, a minimal rate. So you have to develop an assessment tool and you have to have a reporting tool. Both of these we've done before. We'd be happy to share these with you, talk to you about it, come out and visit with you and see exactly what your needs are and try to help you with determining what's the best path to go down. Again, monitoring is vital and you have to include, you don't have to, but I highly recommend that you involve your employees in the development of this, the monitoring, the assessment. You only want to measure what is important sometimes when companies and people get to developing assessment tools and monitoring tools, they want to measure everything. Well, not everything is important and you can get really burdened with trying to measure too much. You also want to allow flexibility in your system. You don't want to be so rigid that there isn't room for some flexibility. Things come up, situations occur that you probably hadn't thought of or you may need to have that flexibility with. So make sure you're not totally rigid with your system that you develop. You want to use several measures. Some people are good in one way of measurement and might not be good in two or three others or vice versa. So you want to have a couple ways to measure it to get a real accurate picture of what your customer service performance or service culture is and the department or employee that's being monitored. This is highly important. Share the information. There's no need to keep it close to your chest. Share the information. It can be a positive feedback experience where people, organizations, departments can get better. So it's very important that we have a system also in place where you can share the feedback. Look at the rest of this page. It tells you a little bit more about what happens when we get involved in this either as a third party or help you devise your own system either way. I'm Brenda Collins. I am the CEO and founder of the Cooper Hamilton Company and you can reach me either at bcollins at the cooperhamiltoncompany.com or at 513-910-3975. I look forward to hearing from you and I hope you enjoy this information and it gives you some food for thought. Feel free to give us a call if you'd like. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.