Improve customer-friendliness tips? With these 8 tips you can get started right away

Improve Customer Friendliness Tip 1: Setting/Mindset.

Work on customer friendliness on an ongoing basis. Don't start a project team that will work on improving customer-friendliness but make sure that customer-friendliness becomes the life of everyone. Involve everyone in improving customer-friendliness and make sure that customer-friendliness becomes a joint responsibility and not a project. It should become a routine where it is 2nd nature. It becomes a habit that you may have to force in the beginning. You become customer friendly by being customer friendly! Not by making it a project. Just think to yourself regularly, "Gee, what would a customer-friendly company do?". Do that often enough and your attitude will naturally change.

Improve Customer Friendliness Tip 2: Improve customer friendliness by setting the standard.

Setting the standard is important. Are we aiming for a 7 or a 9? When setting the standard, it is important to include the wishes of the customer. Do customers find it important that the phone is answered immediately or do they not mind waiting a while as long as they get the right answer at once. Improving customer friendliness means taking into account what your customer likes. By the way, the standard is not static. Regular conversations with customers will have to be held to reset or confirm the standard. Internal considerations may also determine the standard. We want to be more customer-friendly than our direct competitor, even if our current customers do not expect it. customer-friendliness then suddenly becomes something on which you can distinguish yourself.

Improve Customer Friendliness Tip 3: Measure to know

Measure to know how you currently score on customer friendliness. Measuring can be done in several ways:

1. Customer Feedback Survey: Ask your customers how they perceive your customer friendliness. This will give you a lot of input and tools to improve customer friendliness.
2. Mystery calling: Through mystery calling, you can get a good view of how you are performing against your set standard.
3. Listening in / listening to call recordings: To get an idea of the customer-friendliness with which your customers are addressed, calls can also be listened in,- or listened to.

Whatever form is chosen: make sure the right things are measured!

Improve Customer Friendliness Tip 4: Help your employees!

When improving Customer Friendliness, it is often desirable to train all employees. This way you guarantee that they have everything they need to achieve the set standards. Training is also not a one-time thing. It is wise to measure customer friendliness at the individual level and also train at the individual level. Measuring at the individual level can also be done in several ways. The easiest way is by listening in. The employee's performance is then put next to the set standard and a certain score comes out of that. This score can be improved using an individual training program. In addition, you can teach them to simply ask yourself the question from time to time: "What would a customer-friendly company do?

Improve customer friendliness Tip 5: Make customer friendliness a KPI

Employees are often rated on many different things. Customer satisfaction and customer friendliness are often not part of it. Still, it is wise to include customer friendliness or customer focus in the assessment for each employee. This is actually possible for every position. Every function within an organization has an interface with customer friendliness. It is difficult to quantify customer friendliness, of course, but you have to be a little creative with that.

Improve Customer Friendliness Tip 6: Share Success!

The moment customer-friendliness is carried throughout the organization, the common goal is to improve customer-friendliness. Make sure everyone is also aware of its achievements. Customer-friendliness then comes to life. It can also create a certain struggle between teams, departments or even business units.

Improve customer friendliness Tip 7: Embed customer friendliness as a target all the way to management

In addition to the executive staff, management is ultimately responsible for customer friendliness. Make sure that any variable rewards include an appraisal component related to customer friendliness.

Improve customer engagement Tip 8: Focus on returns

Customer service often yields more than it costs. Quantify the returns. Just what does increased customer satisfaction yield? What is the result of this process improvement. In this way, everything you do remains tangible and you ensure support within the organization.