Is your New Year’s resolution to be a service excellence leader?

This post was written by the GuildQuality Team and published in Qualified Remodeler. 

As a home professional, you deal with homeowners on a daily basis. While customer service is most likely a top priority for you and your team, are you truly a service excellence leader? Even if the answer is yes, what can you do to improve?

Your customers are the lifeblood of your business, so ensuring that they’re satisfied is crucial to your success. Even more, a happy customer is your best marketer, so it’s important to deliver a positive experience they can’t wait to tell their friends about.

Here are three tips to help ensure that your company leads the pack when it comes to service excellence.

Create a customer-centric culture

There are many different ideas around what company culture actually means. It’s not always about office happy hours and free lunches – it’s about defining the core values that are going to drive your business forward. If you’re looking to stand out as a company that’s dedicated to customer service, you must build that into your company’s core values. It’s also important to get your team to buy in, which means they must adopt those values and beliefs and apply them to every interaction they have with your customers.

Define success using customer feedback

Once your team is on board, it’s time to define how you measure success. It is the number of referrals you generate? Or repeat business? While these are good metrics to track, do they truly tell the entire story around customer satisfaction?

Start by gathering feedback from all of your customers, not just the super happy or super angry ones. This way, you’ll gain insights into all aspects of the customer experience. Have a standard process with a set list of questions you ask every customer so you can set goals around those standards. Maybe your goal is to have 90 percent of your customers say they would recommend you to a friend. Whatever your goals are, it’s important to define them and have an easy and efficient way of measuring whether or not you achieve them.

Communicate with your customers

There are a lot of ups and downs during a remodeling project. Things don’t always go according to plan, so it’s important to have open lines of communication with your customers at all times. Keep a pulse on how the customer feels throughout the project with scheduled check-ins, and also be sure to follow up after the project is complete to get their feedback.

If you’re not proactively getting this feedback, you may miss out on the opportunity to fix a problem or correct a negative situation or impression. Even worse, you might think everything went well with a customer, but maybe they just didn’t voice their concerns to you and instead told their friends, family, or even social network about their issue. As we always say, it’s better to be proactive when it comes to customer satisfaction than reactive.

A company culture centered around customer satisfaction isn’t something that can be mastered overnight. It takes dedication from you and your team to providing the best possible customer experience with every single interaction.