Consistency is King

 Babe Ruth is considered by to be one of the greatest athletes of all time and is famous for setting the home run record. He also holds the record for strikeouts! On any given day he was either very good or very bad making his team a little nervous when he went up to the plate. Which Babe was playing that day? 

Clients are happier when their service is consistent. They would rather have “fairly good” service all the time than great service sometimes, and poor service other times. Ups and downs in quality make people nervous. In our business it is not uncommon to take a fabulous message one day that brings a compliment from the caller, but the very next day fail to page a message that could be worth big bucks for our client. Those two instances don’t REALLY balance each other out. The client is going to remember the lost revenue much more than the compliment. 

There are two possibilities at work in the above scenario. The message that earned the compliment could have been taken by one agent and the dropped message taken by another. OR, the same agent could have handled both messages; we all have good days and bad days. We need to develop habits that allow us to be consistently good. The Award of Excellence sets a criteria of 80% as a satisfactory call. That’s “fairly good”. If a company’s calls are consistently at 80% their customer base is probably pretty steady. Clients aren’t complaining but they aren’t thrilled. “Fairly happy” customers can be lured away but most will not leave on their own. 

However, in this competitive industry most of us are able to prove that we provide better than fairly good” service 80% of the time. When a serious mistake is made, or a competitor begins intense marketing, a “fairly good” service is likely to lose customers. 

How can YOU help your company maintain its customer base? By being consistently better than 80%. Build good habits. Make sure your voice is warm and interested on every call. Repeat the telephone numbers and spell last names. Say “please” and “thank you” on every call and use the caller’s name when possible (we all LOVE to hear our name). Listen carefully and repeat the message so that callers know you were listening and got it right. Finally, be sure the message is handled properly after you disconnect the call. 

These are simple things that will increase your score. There are several ways to achieve an 80% call, scoring high on some and low on others would be one way – or you can achieve 80% on every call. Your customers would far rather have 80% on all calls! Begin by trying to achieve a minimum of 80% and then work on specific things to make your scores better. If you can consistently provide 85% - 87% or plus 90% accuracy – you will be helping your company thrive and grow.