IDS HR Study 792, February 2005

Customer service initiatives

• Explores the key role of HR in helping to support customer service initiatives
• Emphasises the importance of service values, recruiting the right people, training and development, internal communications, performance management and employee recognition
• Features six detailed case studies of organisations that have introduced successful initiatives

Achieving consistently high customer satisfaction levels is a challenge for almost any organisation, particularly given the business realities of pressure from competitors and ever-rising customer expectations. On a practical level, people management activities have to be clearly aligned to customer service objectives, supporting them through a combination of:

• selection procedures - in building a service culture, companies may put the emphasis on hiring individuals who demonstrate good interpersonal skills and the capacity to see things from the customer's perspective
• training and development - new initiatives may be supported by company-wide training programmes that encompass on-the-job training, in-house courses and formal qualifications
• performance management - organisations are increasingly adopting competencies or performance targets that are directly linked to the delivery of service excellence, whether this is to external customers or internally to colleagues
• recognition for the best employees - customer service values can be reinforced by singling out for praise those employees who epitomise them.

Organisations also express their commitment to delivering excellent customer service through their mission statements or core values. But rather than just paying lip service to such values, companies must align them to activities such as the design of training programmes and performance reviews. Used correctly, a strong set of values can help to establish the overall tone of an organisation's customer service culture, emphasise desired employee behaviours and set the benchmark by which individual and team performance is measured.