Customer service is the business of every employee — now, that’s not just a phrase Dave Wangler throws around at TMW Systems Inc., it’s the attitude he wants his nearly 400 employees to embody.
“Everybody realizes they’re here because of the customer and only because of the customer,” says Wangler, president and CEO of TMW, a solutions provider for the transportation sector. “Our employees recognize that TMW might be the name on their paycheck, but they actually work for our customers, and our customers get to vote in the marketplace on whether we’re doing a good job or not.”
In order to build strong customer relationships, two sets of expectations have to be addressed — what you expect from your employees in terms of customer service and what your customers should expect from you. It’s those interlocking thoughts that have allowed TMW to meet its 1,800 customers’ needs.
Smart Business spoke with Wangler about how to set customer expectations.
Build customer relationships. What it comes down to is establishing very clear expectations and delivering upon those. Say what you’re going to do and do what you said you were going to do.
We deliver fairly complex software solutions that companies rely upon to run every aspect of their business.
Having expectations, for example, of what an implementation of our software might look like, what benefits they can expect to see, what challenges they’re likely to encounter as we implement and as they go forward using our solutions.
Establishing clear expectations in the sales process and in the delivery process and delivering against those really drives successful customer relationships.
If you get off on a good footing as you begin the relationship, you establish a reputation with that customer, or an expectation of if they’ve got a problem, what is your response going to be.
You set those expectations. ‘If you have a problem, you call us. Here’s what’s going to happen.’ And you follow up on those, and you deliver against those. I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that.
Be open. If you can’t (meet their expectations), then you have to explain to them why.
Notice I started with establish clear expectations. In other words, if we go in and our expectations are mismatched about what a product or service is going to do or what it’s going to cost, we have a problem.
I need to establish clear expectation on the front end and agree to what those are. If I fail to meet expectations that I’ve set, I think one has to be pretty frank with customers and sit down and explain to them why. Either one or two things is possible, A, they’re reasonable, but you’re failing to meet them, so you need to come up with a plan as to how you can. Or they’re unreasonable; maybe things have changed.
You’ve got to be clear about re-establishing, resetting expectations so that you’ve got the right yardstick that the customer can measure the company by.
