Great company culture can be hard to define, but you know it when you feel it. There’s a certain atmosphere at companies with great cultures – a feeling that anything is possible.

These are companies where people love coming to work every day, where they believe in the mission and values of the organisation, and where they feel like they are part of something larger than themselves.

A new company culture survey has shed some light on the state of company culture in the UK and the results are quite interesting.

1. Hire for fit, not just for skills

When you’re hiring new employees, look for people who share your company’s values and who will fit in with your existing culture. It’s no coincidence that companies with great cultures also have great customer service. When employees feel valued and appreciated, they are more likely to go the extra mile for customers.

The best way to do this is to create a detailed job description that includes not only the skills and experience you’re looking for but also the personal qualities and attributes you value.

When you’re interviewing candidates, take the time to assess whether they would be a good cultural fit for your organisation. Ask questions about their customer service philosophy and how they would handle difficult customer service situations.

The more you can learn about a candidate’s personal goals and aspirations, the better you’ll be able to gauge whether they’ll be a good fit for your company. Without a good cultural fit, even the most skilled employees will probably leave – taking their expertise with them.

In fact, more than 90% of employees revealed they would want to leave their existing position if their company culture did not align with their expectations. Also, when looking for a new role, 80% of male employees listed company culture as one of the most important priorities for job seeking.

2. Make sure your mission and values are more than just words on a wall

Company culture is driven by the actions of leaders and employees, not just by posters in the break room. If you want your company culture to be more than just lip service, you need to make sure your mission and values are reflected in everything you do.

This starts with setting the right tone at the top. Leaders need to model the behaviour they expect from employees. If you want your team to be passionate and customer-centric, you need to show them what that looks like in action.

Your mission and values should also be woven into your job listings. When potential candidates see that your company’s values align with their own, they’ll be more likely to apply – and more likely to stick around if they’re hired.

And, make sure you have systems and processes in place that reinforce your company culture. For example, if one of your values is “customer first,” make sure your customer service team has the authority to do whatever it takes to make the customer happy.

3. Encourage transparency and open communication

Companies with great cultures are built on trust. Employees need to feel like they can be open and honest with each other – and with leaders – without fear of reprisal.

When a customer has a problem, the last thing they want is to be shuffled around from department to department with no one taking responsibility for solving the issue. The same is true of employees. They need to feel like their concerns will be heard and addressed in a timely manner.

Encouraging transparency and open communication start with creating an environment where employees feel comfortable speaking up. This could mean setting up an anonymous feedback system, hosting regular town halls, or simply making it a point to check in with employees regularly.

It also means being open and honest with employees about the state of the business. If there are challenges, share them. And if there are successes, make sure everyone knows about them too.

4. Promote a healthy work-life balance

In today’s 24/7 world, it’s easy to burn out. When people feel like they have to choose between their job and their personal life, it’s a recipe for disaster.

It starts with setting expectations. If you want your employees to be passionate and engaged, you need to give them the time and space to recharge outside of work. Customer service is a people business, and people can’t perform at their best when they’re running on empty.

It’s also important to provide employees with the tools and resources they need to do their job effectively – without having to put in extra hours. This could mean things like flexible work schedules, or remote working options. From the aforementioned company culture survey, more than 40% of employees work in hybrid positions, equally splitting their time between working from home and in-office visits.

Even after pandemic restrictions are lifted, many employees will appreciate the option to continue working from home at least part of the time. And, studies have shown that employees who have a good work-life balance are more productive and engaged.

5. Invest in employee development

The best companies are always looking for ways to improve. They encourage employees to stretch themselves and take on new challenges. They provide opportunities for employees to learn and grow. And they recognise and reward employees for their efforts.

In customer service, essentials skill such as active listening, empathy, and conflict resolution can be learned – but they need to be practised to be perfected. That’s why it’s so important to provide employees with opportunities to develop their skills.

This could come as online training courses, on-the-job coaching, or even sending employees to industry conferences.

Besides investing in employee development, it’s also important to invest in the tools and resources employees need to do their job. This could mean things like state-of-the-art customer service software, or sophisticated call centre equipment.

Final Thoughts

Creating a great company culture doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time, effort, and commitment. But it’s worth it. A great company culture attracts and retains the best employees. It boosts morale and productivity. And it makes your company a more enjoyable place to work.

The company culture survey was created by OKR training consultants There Be Giants.

One of the major weaknesses of most organizations is top management’s lack of a customer service strategy.  They fail to realize the strategic opportunity on how to use superior service as a vehicle to build market share and market dominance.

Sam Walton, one of the most powerful retailers in the world, built Walmart on Customer Service and price. They are now known for price only.  The value of their company as a service leader has dropped as they have lost their focus on customer service when Lee Scott took over as CEO in January 2000. When Scott left in January 2009 the stock value was less than when he started as CEO. I always had trouble understanding why  management for Walmart has simply focused on price alone for the last 13 years.

The $1000 I invested in Walmart and eight other service leaders in May 2003 is only worth $3,499 as of October 2022. The investment at Amazon is worth $73,478, Costco $19,648 and Home Depot $14,858. All three companies provide Relentless Customer Service. Very few executives understand the financial impact when you provide Relentless Customer Service year after year. COVID gave most firms in the world an opportunity to abandon Customer Service. A fatal mistake.

Along came Amazon. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and Executive Chair is one of the world’s richest person as of October 2022 with a Net Worth of $138.6 billon. He built his company to become the most trusted and well-liked brand. No one can challenge them.  Wal-Mart is so far behind!!

Mr. Bezos is responsible for creating over 352,000 new full -time jobs since 2020 for the American economy and is on schedule to create more.

Use these guidelines in making decisions about the features of your customer service culture plan:

1. Under-promise and over-deliver. Don’t make a promise you can’t keep.

2. Only the customer knows what he or she wants:

3. Make it easy to do business with your company

6. Communicate. Be like Amazon and have a “relentless” focus on customer service through regular communication.

7. Continue to drive the plan strategically. According to Jeff Bezos, “Focus on the things that don’t change”. Bezos built Amazon around things he knew would be stable over time.

In my book Relentless I state that if you want to grow and succeed long-term. You got to be a service leader. To do that, you’ve got to be “Relentless”.

“Also essential is…  a chief executive who is just as committed to customer satisfaction as he is to stockholder satisfaction….just look at Amazon, Costco and Home Depot!!  –John Tschohl

About the Author

John Tschohl is a professional speaker, trainer, and consultant. He is the President and founder of Service Quality Institute (the global leader in customer service) with operations in over 40 countries. John is a self-made millionaire traveling and speaking more than 50 times each year. He is considered to be one of the foremost authorities on service strategy, success, empowerment and customer service in the world. John’s monthly strategic newsletter is available online at no charge. He can also be reached on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

For more information on John Tschohl and the Service Quality Institute, visit www.customer-service.com.

Every company has a culture whether you’ve defined it or not. The key is to be in the driver’s seat of defining your culture and being deliberate about shaping it before you are trying to reign in an undesirable culture that has taken hold. If you find yourself in the latter position take heart, all is not lost. It is very doable, provided you make the commitment and persevere through the process.

Definition of Culture – The sum of attitudes, customs, and beliefs that distinguishes one group of people from another.

When you begin the discussion of defining the desired culture of your organization, this is the time to consider:

• What does it look like to work in your company and with your company?
• How is the engagement between leaders and staff, staff and customers?
• What is the environment like? Relaxed and casual, or professional and formal? Is it an open working environment or one that uses high walled cubicles?
• How do you welcome people in – both as staff and clients? Your culture will be apparent the moment you greet your first candidate or client. The friendliness factor, the thoroughness and follow up displayed exemplifies the culture of your company.
• Are you a company to be taken seriously, or are you one that looks great on paper, but in practice falls short?
• Is there clarity around the purpose of your company and product or service? There will be a measurable impact on the success of your company when staff truly believes that what they do matters to the success of the company and the overall customer experience.
• How much autonomy will you give your staff? Will they be trained and empowered to fulfill their responsibilities within the organization and with clients?
• Do you want a more formal and rigid top-down management style or do you want to empower people to act with the entrepreneurial spirit?

Questions such as these will feed into the amount of risk your staff is willing to take in making decisions or working to solve issues for your customers and clients.

Take action in defining – or redefining – your culture by having purposeful conversations with key leaders around the desired culture of your company. As your discussions progress, the process will benefit by giving staff the opportunity to provide input. Staff will have different perspectives and ideas to be considered when crafting the ultimate outcome.

I stress that Leadership should have the most input on the desired culture definition. Leaders are guiding the direction of the company and if they are true leaders, they should have the insight and understanding on the best course to travel.

Make sure your culture is unique! Even though you may have several competitors in the same space or industry, your culture as a company within that space needs to feel unique. Books are written about Zappos, Ritz Carlton, Nordstrom, Disney, Apple for a reason. They are successful companies with strong cultures. But don’t try to copy them or be like them. I tell my clients to try to be as impactful as them. All those companies have competition in their space, yet they are unique.

Key components in setting a successful organizational culture

Setting the culture begins at the top. Regardless of the size of your company, the leaders set the tone and example in the congruency of their attitudes, actions, words, and considerations when working with customers, selecting products, and engaging with staff.

Hire people based on competencies and culture fit. I can’t stress this one enough. My experience shows that 90% of all customer experience and culture work is accomplished simply by hiring the right people that will support and sustain your desired culture. Should you have staff that work against it, or at the very least – don’t support it, this work can be extremely frustrating and ultimately futile. Even just a few people with the wrong attitudes can throw the entire program off course.

You may have two people you are considering for the same position. One is competent yet lacks the years of experience the other does. Yet, the first one actively engaged in the interview when you discussed the culture of your company. You gleaned the impression that they would be very helpful in sustaining the culture you are working hard to execute for staff and clients.

The candidate with years of experience didn’t openly say they didn’t like the described culture, but they asked a few times if they could bring in ways of doing things that had worked for them in their past job if they could work as they needed to on their own as long as the desired outcome was achieved.

Guess which one will be successful in your company? The first candidate. Provided they have the necessary credentials and training, you can train skills and competencies specific to your company. You just can’t train attitudes easily at all. The wrong attitude can derail your culture work.

Open communication promotes success. Companies with free and open communication are far more successful in establishing an engaging culture. When staff feels free to ask questions and discuss core issues with leadership, they’ll be much more engaged, and the culture is strengthened, thus the company “team” is united in working in the best interest of the customer and the company reaps the reward of their continued loyalty.

The Consequences of not focusing on Culture

You can be successful in spite of yourselves, but that is not the norm. Not taking the time to actively shape the culture is indicative of a “non-directional” culture prone to reactionary decisions, inconsistencies in customer experiences, and intermittent lucky successes.

Possible Indications of Needing Culture Work

• Employee turnover
• Customer churn
• Lackluster performance by employees
• Disengaged staff
• Minimum expectations delivered by staff
• Low attendance at company events
• Employee -vs- Leadership mindset
• Declining customer loyalty and satisfaction

Prioritizing the definition and execution of your ideal Culture will pays off in many ways:

• Morale will increase
• Staff will willingly engage outside of their own responsibilities do more than the minimum
• Everyone will understand and embrace the purpose of the company and actively work to support and promote it
• Staff will feel empowered and engaged resulting in more thoughtful decisions to benefit both the company and the customers
• Customers will benefit by doing business with a company where they feel they are part of an organization actively working to help them succeed in their responsibilities and goals
• The Customer Experience will increase customer loyalty and generate referrals
• Increased referrals and loyalty promote higher sales, resulting in higher profits, resulting in the successful longevity of the company!

About the Author

Kristina Evey is improving the way companies connect with their customers and increase their profits, she is an accomplished speaker and trainer on Customer Satisfaction and Retention.

1. Educate towards Empathy

It’s easier to get employees to care about customers by putting them in the place of customers. That’s why when clients bring me in to conduct customer service training for their teams, I ask participants to create a list of what they expect when they are customers. Then we reveal tips on how, by simply changing a few words, staff can demonstrate that they understand the customer’s perspective. Compare: “I’ll have to check our schedule” vs. “I’ll be happy to check our schedule for you.”

2. Catch Them Being Good!

That message was pasted on a banner at a daycare across from a fitness room where I was working out. It was meant to remind the staff to pay attention when toddlers are doing the right things; not just correcting them when they misbehave. Similarly, managers foster better customer experiences by catching employees when they provide exceptional service. The key then is to ensure all team members learn from the positive behavior.

3. Stage a CAST Meeting

Getting employees to care requires more than a onetime event; it requires ongoing nurturing of your customer service culture. To make the process more efficient, consider staging CAST meetings. CAST stands for a Customer Service Team Meeting. It’s where leaders and their teams talk about how to make the experience better for customers, employees, managers and other stakeholders. CAST meetings take as little as 90 minutes a month and you’ll find that in as little as six months they transform your customer service culture. Essentially they involve reminding team members of your service mission and standards, providing a coaching moment, disseminating customer service feedback, discussing ways to enhance the experience, and celebrating your service legends—examples where staff went above and beyond for customers.

4. Turn Service Stars into Owners

As the expression goes, owners care more, and it shows (particularly to customers). Employees who have a vested financial interest in ensuring customers are happy over the long term take a different approach to service than those who are just waiting for a paycheck. That may mean putting your money (actually your equity) where your mouth is. At some point high performing frontline employees, who presumably don’t earn as much as managers, are going to want to create a more secure financial future. One of the most effective ways to involve them—literally—is to offer share ownership to your star performers.

Bottom line—Cultivating a customer service culture isn’t complicated. It does however require training and support. Some managers claim they’re too busy for this. My question: in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace where your service is increasingly the only significant differentiator, what could possibly be more important to managers than ensuring your team provides outstanding service that customers notice, pay a premium for, and tell others about?

About the Author

Jeff Mowatt is a customer service strategist, Hall of Fame speaker, and bestselling author. For more tips, training tools or to inquire about engaging Jeff for your team visit JeffMowatt.com.

Let’s look at each of these four points more closely to understand a leadership team’s critical role in building an “uplifting” and sustainable service culture in an organization.

1. Set a Vision and Purpose

Leaders must create a service vision that creates value for customers and employees. A powerful service vision will stimulate your team’s ambition and will reflect through their commitment to serve.

What is the purpose for building a superior service culture? Why is it so essential for customers? What can an organization achieve by focusing more vigorously and creatively on delivering “superior service”?

This “service vision” should not only have meaning for employees serving external customers, but to everyone serving internal colleagues as well. If you want your frontline teams to deliver outstanding service, you need to build the standards of world-class service throughout the organization.

2. Be an Inspiration to the Entire Organization

Leadership must keep “building a superior service culture” high in spirit and motivation, and high on the company’s agenda. Leaders must walk-the-talk – reinforcing their words with visible commitments through widely recognized culture building activities.

When you aim to build a superior service culture in your organization, this is not the responsibility of the customer service department or the human resource department – it is also your personal responsibility as a leader.

It is your duty to inspire everyone on the team by communicating the relevance of great service value for customers and for each other. By following your example, each member of the organization will become aware of their actions, commitment, and obligation to contribute to your success.

3. Ensure Service Education is Followed by Constructive Action

While introducing new customer service education and training programs in an organization, your teams will learn new terms, distinctions, practices and fundamental principles to improve the service they provide. But education is only effective when learning is put into practice, and when those practices create new value for others.

Always be on the lookout for new actions and creative suggestions from your teams – especially your frontline teams as they are closest to your customers. These new ideas to improve service can then be evaluated by your leadership team, and supported with new resources and encouragement.

4. Create a Conducive Environment for Service

Mistakes are bound to happen whenever something new is tried or introduced. It is your duty as a leader to take, measure, and manage these risks. Convert “oops into opportunities”, make mistakes into learning occasions. Use errors to inspire everyone to continue to learn, improve and grow.

Talking about building an “uplifting service culture” can be simple, but leading this powerful will be a greater challenge requiring leaders to step out of their comfort zones and become deeply involved. Following these four key steps will start you, or take you further, along a proven path to your success.

About the Author

Ron Kaufman is an internationally acclaimed educator for quality service. He is author of the bestselling series “UP! Your Service” and founder of “UP! Your Service College”

Disney excels at customer service, and the reason is that the company looks at everything through the eyes of the customer. You can too.

At each step of the customer’s experience, ask what you are doing to the customer. Then, for each step, ask yourself what mediocre service looks like and what would excellent service look like.

Creating a service culture means several things:

1. Top management must value customers and employees. I am not just talking about the annual report. It must be driven strategically. You must be willing to invest in developing high performing employees.

2. Make it easy for customers to do business with you. In the U.S., most firms use IVR so they do not need to talk to customers. Many outsource their call center to India. You need a live person to answer the call in 1 or 2 rings 24/7. Too many organizations are more focused on cutting costs than keeping customers.

3. All employees must be trained with a new customer service program every 4 months. Must be different and new. Get over the idea that there is a magic program that will change employee behaviors and attitudes for life. For example, Progressive Insurance creates new commercials every month. The most expensive part of advertising is the TV time. The most expensive part of training your staff is labor time. Whatever tools you use must be really good. I believe very few organizations care about results.

4. Follow service leaders like Amazon and Metro Bank London. Go to their websites and sign up under Investor Relations for the daily and weekly press releases. Jeff Bezos and Vernon Hill are light years ahead of almost all CEO’s in the world.

5. Master empowerment. Enable every employee to make fast empowered decisions in favor of the customer. Too many weird things happen every day. Teach principles and empower your employees.

According to Brad Cleveland, Co-Founder and Senior Adviser of the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), a recent Gallup poll found that when both customers and employees are engaged, companies see a 240 percent increase in performance-related outcomes, which goes to show that a customer service culture “really matters”.

About the Author

John Tschohl is a customer service strategist and is the founder and president of the Service Quality Institute. John has been described by USA Today, Time, and Entrepreneur as a ‘customer service guru’ and has written several highly acclaimed customer service books.

It is easy to become reactive rather than maintain a proactive approach that will lead them towards their company’s vision.

Retailers understand the importance of delivering Superior Customer Service that exceeds their competitors. How can retailers ensure that their people strive for a high level of service?

Here are 6 simple tips:

1. Recruit the right people

The recruitment process is crucial in developing strong customer focused teams. Employers must ensure that the interview process effectively determines the suitability of potential employees. Behavioral questions will help assess whether the person will suit a retail environment together with the culture fit of the company.

2. Train your people

The Induction process together with the ongoing training of your people is imperative to your staff’s future success. Customer Service must be a strong focus in the training process. New employees must receive a job description that clearly outlines the expectations of the role. This will ensure that the employee feels confident and will reach their full potential.

3. Minimize tasks

Tasks are part of any job but a business with strong customer focus understands the importance of keeping those tasks to a minimum. Companies must be mindful of all tasks effecting the business, like those silent e-mails from different departments that involve extra tasks. Visual merchandising is also a great tool to enhance product and make sales but don’t make it too much of a focus and take your staff away from the most important person, the customer. Make it a focus to review and minimize tasks in your business.

4. Effective staffing levels

When sales are down, one of the first places targeted for change is in the reduction of staffing levels. This is an important cost factor but be mindful of analyzing each business carefully. Don’t underestimate the potential and needs of your business or your people.

5. Walk the Talk

A customer service culture begins at the top. All actions and words must reflect this vision from everyone in the company. From policy & procedure manuals, Induction programs, memos from Head office and executive store visits. All of the above must reflect the Customer First vision at all times.

6. Reward on Service

Recognize the performance of your staff’s customer service ability. Set goals based on exceeding customer’s expectations and reward your staff on achieving them. This will build confidence, increase staff morale and help promote healthy competition within your team..

About the Author

Janelle Johnston is Founder & Director of the Corporate Training & Life Coaching Institute, Australia.

In this article I will share four actions which can help companies ease the transition to a customer-facing culture.

Even among firms with strong engineering, scientific and R&D legacies, it is increasingly common for executives to want their companies to become more customer-facing.

That aspiration is admirable – these are the companies that thoroughly understand their customers and fully incorporate customer insights into their own plans and priorities.

Does your organization have a customer facing culture? Here are four actions which can help companies ease the transition to a customer-facing culture..

1. Create the right connections

With the right connections between your people and those in the customer organization – your product development experts and the customer’s product development experts, your logistics managers and the customer’s logistics managers – discussions become fruitful and open an ongoing exchange. Too often, the implementation of “getting other departments involved” is taking them on sales calls. This may be useful and necessary, but rarely is the way to build sustained interaction.

2. Focus on the future

An agenda that includes future looking topics creates excitement and interest, and encourages creative new ideas. All too often, discussion defaults to either current operations or a past problem. Success stories won’t come out of every interaction, but occur often enough when the right people are talking about the right topics, and the opportunity to do something is in front of them.

3. Bring clarity, energy, and cadence to interactions

It takes a real commitment – and usually a very proactive champion – to jumpstart an effective relationship with a customer organization. Best practice organizations have a plan for their interactions with customers, and ensure that someone is responsible for making that plan happen.

4. Track goals with meaningful measurements

If your organization is going to be committed to customer relationships, there should be meaningful measurements in place reflecting the goals of the program. We’ve all heard some version of the statement “if it’s not measured, it doesn’t matter.” That truth applies here as well.

The payoff from success in building a customer-facing culture is enormous. To be part of such shared successes along with your customers, the entire organization must believe in and contribute to creating and nourishing customer relationships.

About the Author

George F. Brown, Jr. is one of the founders and CEO of Blue Canyon Partners, Inc. In recent years, he has helped clients develop and implement strategies to achieve global market presence and reach decisions relating to segmentation strategies, pricing, channel management, and major customer relationship management. He is the coauthor of CoDestiny: Overcome Your Growth Challenges by Helping Your Customers Overcome Theirs, published by Greenleaf Book Group Press of Austin, TX.

At any given moment, there is survey after survey showing what customers want and the impact when customers don’t receive what they want.

With outsourcing being rampant, having an organizational culture where excellence is a habit seems to be a no brainer.

Common sense suggests that if I want to keep my job that is based upon a continual stream of customers then it would be extremely beneficial to deliver professional customer service.

Unfortunately, customer service still appears to be a significant issue and millions, if not billions, of dollars are being lost on a daily basis because organizations and employees still don’t get it. These 7 tips may help you to stem the tide and create a customer service culture where the goal of professionalism and excellence is achieved each and every business day.

Define Your Core Values

The Ritz Carlton had a simple core values statement that was shared by everyone: Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. Whatever your core values are, they must begin at the top and cascade down throughout the entire organization.

Review and Reassess Internal Policies and Procedures

Many organizations set their people up to fail because the policies and procedures are not customer service friendly. For example, I recently returned a phone call to a manager of a national chain who left me his extension. I listened to the automated message and waited to hear the usual statement: If you know your party’s 3 or 4 digit extension, please dial that at any time followed by the # sign. When the message wasn’t heard, I hit the zero key and was told that it was not an appropriate key. I hung up and re-dialed. Then when prompted for “General Services,” I hit the appropriate key and learned I was speaking to someone on the front desk. This automated procedure was not creating a customer service culture of professionalism.

Talk to Your External Customers

Many companies have now developed the habit of surveying customers using the Internet. Yet, communicating through technology doesn’t allow for the organization to truly hear what is not being said. Remember what is seen is always heard before what is said. Take the time to conduct face to face interviews or at least telephone interviews. A good communicator can sense the tone and the nuances within the speech patterns of the person being interviewed.

Develop your Employees

Training is essential to performing any job. Yet, most people know how to answer the phone, but answering the phone consistently is really about development. When I called this hotel manager, 3 different individuals all of whom provided me with a different script greeted me. Knowing that consistency was a significant part of this hotel’s training, I knew that only one of them had delivered the “trained” response. In speaking with the manager, he confirmed that all 3 were long time employees and should have spoken the same message. So the issue is not training or learning (the acquisition of knowledge), because the employees know what they need to say, but rather development or performance (the application of knowledge).

Align performance to quality criteria such as Baldrige

Just as the favorite cake from Aunt Emma or that delectable soup from your favorite restaurant, you know that every time you take a bite, you will receive exactly the same sense of utter enjoyment. Why? Because Aunt Emma or Chef Tony used the same proportions of quality food each and every time. To deviate from that recipe would spell disaster and create enormous disappointment for their favorite people.

The Baldrige criteria are one of the best predictors of organizational success. Employing such a criteria will help to create a customer service culture of professionalism.

Use Internal Customers Feedback

Checking with employees while they are employed and when they leave is a simple way to gauge what is happening within the company. Loyal internal customers or employees are what drive loyal external customers. Performance appraisals and exit interviews can be tremendous tools to elevate customer service.

Ask yourself “Would I Buy from My Company or Me?”

Finally, ask yourself this simple question: “Would I Buy from My Company or Me?” Do you find yourself going to other places to shop or eat? Why are you taking such action? Is it because of company policy, prices are too high, lines are too long? If you wouldn’t buy from your company, then why should anyone else?

If you use these 7 basic tips, your company can create a customer service culture where professionalism is consistently high and loyal customers are the norm and not the exception.

About the Author

Leanne Hoagland-Smith coaches small businesses to large organizations and high school students to entrepreneurs to double performance by closing the gap between today’s outcomes and tomorrow’s goals.