Leadership Institute

Creating A Service Culture

Recommended Solution for: Creating A Service Culture

If customer satisfaction is a strategic priority of the organization, creating a service culture is what it takes to get there. Organizations need a culture where the customers’ needs are central to decisions about systems, processes, and behaviors.

Leaders must:

  • Understand their roles as service leaders in creating an effective service culture.
  • Identify enablers, barriers, actions, and clear accountabilities to support a service culture and the training required to achieve it.
  • Align individual performance with the organization’s service vision, values, and business strategies.
  • Focus their efforts and those of the service providers to achieve the results most important to customers.
  • Inspire service providers to take actions that create customer loyalty.
  • Support and encourage their work groups’ efforts to form effective partnerships with internal and external customers.

Service providers must:

  • Feel confident about their skills in handling every customer interaction.
  • Make customers feel good about themselves, the service they receive, and the organization.
  • Provide the kind of service that keeps customers coming back, and telling others about the great service they received.
  • Confidently handle problems, unpredictable events, and other job pressures while serving customers.

Course Recommendations

These offerings help organizations drive customer loyalty.

  • Creating a Service Culture:  The Service Leader’s Role -- Helps leaders develop the skills needed to conduct a service culture analysis and provides them with the five key leader practices they need in order to create a service culture.
  • Service Plus® -- Helps service providers build the skills and knowledge they need to provide truly exceptional customer service, leading to customers who exhibit the three R’s of customer loyalty – return, refer, and relate.
  • Service Plus® Health Care: Building Patient Loyalty -- Helps care providers and support staff build the skills and knowledge they need to provide truly exceptional patient service, leading to patients who exhibit the three R’s of loyalty – return, refer, and relate.

Supplemental Courses and Development Tools

Training for Leaders:

  • Setting Performance Expectations
  • Reviewing Performance Progress
  • Building Winning Partnerships
  • Partnerships for Improvement (No prerequisite course required)

Training for Service Providers:

  • Partnerships for Improvement (No prerequisite course required)
  • Communicating with Others
  • Personal Empowerment: Taking Initiative (No prerequisite course required)
  • Taking Action to Solve Problems (No prerequisite course required)

Rationale

These offerings establish the framework and build the skills required to create a customer-focused culture which will drive the organization to achieve higher levels of employee satisfaction and retention, and increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, resulting in organizational success.  Important leadership practices that DDI research shows are essential to creating a service culture:

  • Create Customer-Focused Work Processes -- Examine how work processes can get in the way of meeting customer expectations, and develop ways to make work processes more customer-focused.
  • Build Partnerships -- Develop specific actions to build internal partnerships to meet or exceed customer expectations.
  • Develop Knowledge and Skills -- Identify actions to ensure service providers get the knowledge and skills they need to provide excellent service.
  • Give Authority -- Develop specific actions to give service providers the authority they need to meet or exceed customer expectations