The Ten Commandments of Customer Service

In December of 2002, Peggy Morrow wrote an article describing her ten commandments of customer service. Using that as an outline, lets adapt that example and her language to our dental laboratories.

1. Care about your employees and treat them well.

Several books and research studies have demonstrated the validity of this simple statement. Employees must feel that they are treated well. All of the tenets of that relationship are reflected in customer relations. Customer satisfaction, loyalty and engagement are impacted by the value of your internal employee engagement systems. Being heard, knowing their role matters, having friends at work, receiving feedback and having someone care about their progress helps employees engage more fully in the laboratory.

2.  Praise and recognize your employees often.

The key here is the word often. By catching your team doing things well and praising them they feel more involved and important in their role with you. It also earns you the right to mention when things are less than perfect. Many technicians tell me they only hear from their supervisor or boss when they have done something wrong.

3.  Know and listen to your customers.

How can you know what your customer values if you do not really know them? A customer will take their business elsewhere if they are not getting what they value.  It is not always about your fee. Service delivery, turnaround time, preferences, material options, CE and quality measures are all usually more important than fee. You can use focus groups, surveys, customer panels, and also just sitting down and talking with them all help to get you in synch with your clients needs and wants.

4.  Believe that customer service drives profit.

There are many case studies and statistics to support this fact. How much you make at the end of the day is truly impacted by your service being good enough. Having the right clients that fit your business model, mission and values is the key. Your core business is providing custom manufactured dental prosthesis. Focus on doing that in the context of excellent customer service that makes the dentists' and their teams more successful and you too will succeed.

5.  Train and empower your people.

This places a high value on team and staff development. People want to grow, be trained to do new things and learn advanced skills. Investing in your most expensive and important asset will pay dividends, not just financial, but behavioral and relationship as well.

6.  Clarify your service strategy.

Ritz Carlton vs. McDonald’s, which level of service are you going to offer. How far are you willing to go in on achieving the level of service that you want? Red Adair said, “You can have it done well, done cheap or done quickly.” Pick two. “You can’t be all things to all people. Define you service style, objectives and strategy and match clients to it. This is an abundance marketplace not rooted in scarcity.  There is an abundance of prospective clients to match your service strategy.  We just have to market precisely to them.”

7. Weed out policies and procedures that are customer unfriendly.

All barriers that are put up to good customer service need to be gone.  It is important to rid all of your rules, policies, and procedures that stand between you and your best customers. Do not put a universal stringent payment policy in place to protect you from a few poor payers that might upset your best clients. Design systems around best accounts and create individual policies to deal with the problems.

8. Be fanatical about customer service.

All focus must be on serving the customer. But is must be in a profitable way. How can we make our client doctors practices easier and more successful and get paid doing it? If a client wants us to come by and take a custom shade or send the patient, make it memorable for the patient and the dentist, and charge a fair fee.  Instead of answering 'no problem' when asked about doing another rush case, place them on hold for a minute and come back with 'you’re in luck, I have asked a couple of my technicians to stay late tonight and tomorrow and we can get that case to you by then.' Tell them you promise the rush fee will not be as high as the overtime you will pay them because you value them so much as a client.  But do charge them something extra so they do not develop a pattern of abuse here.

9.  Continually improve your service levels.

Everyone within the company needs to be continuously looking for ways to improve customer service. The development of a system should be done to captures everyone’s ideas and then implement the best of them. Brainstorm periodically with your technicians, support staff, delivery partners and your clients. Ask and listen - something good will surface that you can use.

10. Remember that everyone has customers.

Internal customer service is just as important as external customer services. Good customer service needs to be delivered between all departments of the laboratory. If the input department, models, wax, metal, porcelain, QC and delivery all think of each other as their customers, the lab will be a more fun place to work. The same customer service modeling you desire for outside relations can be applied inside as well.