This begins with you. How can you expect your employees to practice good habits if you don’t practice them yourself?
Your goal as a leader should also be to live better every day. This involves managing your time well and practicing how to delegate.
It also involves practicing skills in which you’re lacking, be it money management or communication.
You have to make better habits for yourself, which will reflect on your employees, which will further reflect in how they treat your customers.
Better Habits
If you are trying to reimagine your business and improve customer service, it can help to take this step back. There are several reasons a person gets into owning a small business in the first place.
Maybe for a better life to some degree, as a solution to feeling unhappy in a previous job, wanting to be one’s own boss or feeling passionate about delivering a particular service to consumers. What was your reason?
You can easily find yourself in a situation where your new business suddenly seems to have taken over. Your business doesn’t leave any time for the other aspects of your life, and it doesn’t make you feel fulfilled.
You aren’t getting happy customer feedback. You’re frustrated and just barely making it work and feel like you’re never getting out of this hole–– at best you might be able to keep it from getting deeper. Does this sound familiar?
Take a Step Back
What you need is to reorganize. Whatever initial, positive image you had that got you started with your business in the first place, it’s possible to work like that.
It’s possible to live that vision. And when you practice new habits and get long-term systems going, you’ll realize that it’s possible to show your customers how much you care, simply by realizing how to act like it.
When you practice long-term solutions, you’re able to create the kind of business you want, for yourself, your employees, and your customers.
Systems
As the leader of your business, you should be spending most of your time investing in the future.
Steps with long-term benefits include streamlining, build company culture, and learning more money and time management.
These will create stability, and only a stable business will be able to deliver excellent customer service with consistency.
Take steps that allow everyone to worry less– organization, accessibility, proper systems. When you take these things seriously, you’ll be able in the long run to focus on the things that matter most to you.
You can allow your employees to enter into every customer relation with enthusiasm, energy, and confidence.
You might think about making a plan. Verbalize a clear and defined vision that speaks to your overall end goal of improving customer service. It can be helpful to create a scale to reflect the kind of customer service you have in mind, and everything that falls short of that.
It can be a five-point scale. At each point, you would describe what that point looks like, what it means, how each experience from most basic to most perfect is defined. Check in regularly, monthly, quarterly, to see what’s improving, what’s not, and what needs to be happening.