I played pretty much all sports when I was younger, even through college. The one that I still play today a lot is tennis. I have had private lessons from professionals, lessons from my dad, and lessons from coaches in high school and college. The one message that holds true in tennis is consistency. You have to be consistent in tennis and the same goes for business.
For instance, there are so many outlets for handling customer service and support issues today. Customer Service issues can be handled via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp…even the “old school†telephone and email route. Consistency is necessary when you’re utilizing one or more of these customer service outlets. You want your business to present a united front and handle all customer service issues generally in the same way.
How can you be consistent? My first answer is training. I have seen certain call centers do a poor job of training (such as my previous job) and none of the customer service reps handled anything the same way. It was a hot mess and it frustrated the customers and other employees to no end…. But we didn’t know any other way. Now, if you call a business such as AT&T, everything is handled in a similar matter…and to me, that’s kind of refreshing since you aren’t being given the runaround.
Keep your customer service methods consistent and achieve this by training everyone the same amount on the same topics and issues. This will improve your customer service significantly.
How do you think businesses should stay consistent? What companies do a great job of keeping a “united front�