Customer service is often the backbone of any successful business. It can be the difference between a customer having a positive or negative experience with your brand, making customer service an essential part of any business strategy.

Crafting the perfect customer service philosophy is essential to ensure that your customer service team can provide the highest quality service. A customer service philosophy should consider your brand’s values, mission, and objectives to ensure that your team can deliver exceptional service every time.

This article will discuss a customer service philosophy, its essentials, and how to craft the perfect one. With a good customer service philosophy in place, you can ensure that your customers will have the best possible experience with your business.

What is a Customer Service Philosophy?

A customer service philosophy is a collection of basic concepts and principles that guide how a company approaches customer service. It’s the basis that determines how personnel in a company go about their everyday tasks. It comprises values, attitudes, and practices that govern how individuals communicate with customers online and in person.

An excellent customer service concept is both inspiring and practical. It should motivate staff to produce outstanding service and create an incredible organizational culture. However, it must also provide detailed instructions for how the team should accomplish this daily.

Making Your Customer Service Philosophy

There are three main steps to crafting your customer service philosophy. First, you’ll want to assess your brand’s values, mission, and objectives. Second, identify your customer service goals. And last, create your customer service philosophy statement. Let’s explore each step in more detail.

Assess your brand’s values, mission, and objectives

The first step in creating your customer service philosophy is to assess your brand’s values, mission, and goals. What do you want your brand to stand for? What is your brand’s mission? What are your brand’s goals? You want to answer these questions as you write your customer service philosophy.

When assessing these, think about how your customers currently perceive your brand. What do they think of when they hear your company name? What do they consider your company doing? What are their biggest frustrations? What are their biggest complaints? Assessing these will help you create a customer service philosophy to address your customers’ current frustrations and complaints.

Identify your customer service goals

Once you’ve assessed your brand’s values, mission, and objectives, you’ll want to identify your customer service goals. What do you want your business to achieve with its customer service? What are your short-term and long-term goals for your customer service? How do you want your customers to feel when interacting with your business?

These goals will inform the rest of your customer service philosophy, so they’re essential to nail down before you start writing. One way to do this is by creating a table with three columns. In the first column, list all of your brand’s values. In the second column, list your brand’s mission. In the third column, list your brand’s objectives.

Create a customer service philosophy statement

Now that you’ve assessed your brand’s values, mission, and objectives and identified your customer service goals, it’s time to create your customer service philosophy statement. This is the actual statement that will make up your philosophy. You can either write it down or create a mission statement poster.

Put your customer service philosophy into practice

Now that you’ve crafted your customer service philosophy, it’s time to implement it. This is where your team members will apply the knowledge. This might seem intimidating, but don’t worry. You’ve already done the heavy lifting by creating your customer service philosophy. Now, you just need to take the time to train your team members on your philosophy and how they can apply it.

Examples of Great Customer Service Philosophies

Now that you know what a customer service philosophy is and how to create one, you might wonder what some examples look like. Here are a few examples of excellent customer service philosophies:

The Ritz-Carlton

The Ritz-Carlton is known for its legendary service, but it didn’t happen overnight. The company’s founder, Jay Pritzker, wrote down the company’s philosophy on a notecard in 1979. This note card, now referred to as “The Ritz-Carlton Service Philosophy,” has remained the same to this day and continues to be used as a guide for the company’s employees.

Zappos

Zappos has always been known for its exceptional customer service. The company’s CEO, Tony Hsieh, wrote the company’s customer service philosophy in a book called “Delivering Happiness” in 2010.

Disney

Disney is dedicated to generating “magical experiences” through exceptional customer service at its parks, retail locations, and elsewhere. Employees at the organization commit to seven customer requirements based on the classic seven dwarfs.

Team members are even instructed to use specialized terminology, such as “cast members” for employees and “guests” for visitors. The Disney Institute also teaches others about the company’s well-known customer service ideas and methods.

Disney’s excellent customer service philosophy has led to millions of satisfied customers and has made it among the world’s most-known companies.

Amazon

Amazon’s customer service philosophy heavily focuses on meeting customer needs. The company likes to say that it is “obsessed” with making sure that its customers are happy and that they receive what they want when they want it.

Tips for Writing the Perfect Customer Service Philosophy

As you’ve probably gathered by now, writing a good customer service philosophy is complex. It takes time, effort, and much creativity. Here are a few tips to make the process a little bit easier:

Get everyone involved

Encourage team participation in the customer service philosophy throughout 1:1 meetings, evaluations, suggestion boxes, questionnaires, team conversations, and other activities. Feedback from those on the “front lines” can stimulate new ideas that the leadership group may not have considered since they lack first-hand experience.

Furthermore, if service team members are involved in the creation process, they are more likely to accept the company’s ideology. Your support personnel will implement your customer care philosophy daily, so they should be able to provide feedback.

Lead by example

Employees throughout the organization will most likely turn to company leaders, particularly managers and far more senior employees, to demonstrate the customer service concept. You can’t expect people to believe it if you don’t.

Set a good example by prioritizing customer service. Regularly demonstrate your philosophy to your customers and staff. If listening is an essential component of the customer service philosophy, for example, be effective in discussions and meetings.

Leaders can also support corporation customer service education initiatives and advise staff as they deal with challenging client situations. The leadership is responsible for gaining undivided support by demonstrating the customer service concept and supporting exceptional customer service across the organization.

Get the company on board

It will take time to implement your customer service concept. You’ll need to educate your employees on the idea and get everyone on board with your customer support values.

Consider an ongoing project of written communication, city hall meetings, lunch and talks, and one-on-one meetings instead of sharing a single paper. It’s about ensuring you’re explicit and that your entire business knows and believes in the concept as a cornerstone of generating those incredible customer experiences.

While your customer care staff is at the center, every division plays a role in delivering a great customer experience, from the HR team hiring assistance specialists to the engineers producing products that customers want to use to your sales team interacting with potential customers.

Benefits of Implementing a Customer Service Philosophy

You probably understand just how important a customer service philosophy is. But if you’re still not convinced, here are a few benefits of implementing a customer service philosophy:

A customer service philosophy guides your employees. It helps them provide consistent and excellent service
A customer service philosophy enables you to attract new customers
It makes it easier to scale your business
A customer service philosophy makes it easier to onboard new employees
It makes retaining and keeping customers happy

These are all why it’s essential to implement a customer service philosophy. With the right philosophy in place, you can ensure that your customers will have the best possible experience with your business.

Conclusion

A customer service philosophy is a system of principles that a company uses to resolve support issues and cultivate customer connections. It acts as a leader for each interaction with a customer. This vision of customer service will guide your strategy to how you want staff to engage with customers and how problems with customers should be resolved. When executed well, this has the potential to strengthen client loyalty, which ultimately helps with customer retention.

What is a customer service philosophy?