Today’s article is the fifth in a series learning from the book by Paul Smith, Lead With A Story: A Guide to Crafting Business Narratives that Captivate, Convince, and Inspire. The book is available wherever bestselling books are sold.
In chapter six, titled “Define Customer Service Success and Failure,” Paul Smith does an excellent job of communicating the immense and lasting power of true, well-crafted customer service stories.
The benefit of such stories goes far beyond the marketing value. Powerful customer service stories — both good and bad — clearly communicate what behaviors and levels of service are expected from employees. As Smith explains, “It’s impossible to train employees for every possible scenario. They’re infinite. But through stories like these, they can learn on a more intuitive level what great customer service looks like.” Such stories help define, communicate, ingrain and sustain the desired culture and company values.
No question, customer service experiences happen within your healthcare organization every day. New stories are being played out all the time — why not leverage them? Smith notes, “When it comes to customer service, you don’t even have to craft your own stories. Your customers will craft them for you — good or bad — if there’s a convenient place to share them.”
Smith ends the chapter with several suggestions for application, including:
- Great customer service stories show employees how to do their jobs with excellence, and can be great PR for the company. Don’t let them go to waste.
- Make it easy for your customers to write their own stories.
- Find stories your customers have written about you… Use them to create more customer service success stories.
- Design your company systems and processes with customer service in mind, not just employee efficiency.
Well-crafted and frequently repeated customer service stories are powerful tools to create the culture, values and customer service levels that healthcare leaders (and their customers) want, need and expect.
Are you maximizing and leveraging the incredible power of customer service stories within your healthcare organization?
