Today’s Follow Friday post is featuring Eric Jacques! Every Friday I share a little with you about someone I like to follow. Eric focuses on “customer excellence” versus “customer satisfaction” or “customer experience”. He says “It’s all about the quest to continuously deliver excellent products and services to customers that create value for those customers and ourselves. Customer excellence is about leadership and visibility, not management. Achieving it identifies you as the best among your peers and ensures long-term growth and loyalty. Customer service grew into the customer experience as an organizational differentiator. Now we have to move towards customer excellence.”
I wanted to know more about Eric and his perspective on “customer excellence”:
Dawna: “What drives you?”
Eric: “In one word, Respect. Respect for customers, employees, friends, strangers, everyone. I consider it to be the basis of all human relationships. Without it, there is no relationship.
Society is based on interactions and relationships. If we can’t respect one another, society will fall apart.
I look at where we’ve been going as a society for the last 30-40 years and sometimes wonder what it will be like for my daughters. I like to think that my wife and I have raised them well (they’re 18 and 15) but feel the need to do my part to ensure that they have the opportunity to be part of something better in the future.”
Dawna: “What makes you tick?”
Eric: “Helping people. At my core, I think I’ve always wanted to be a teacher; I’ve always wanted to have a positive impact on society.
Originally, business/commerce was about helping others and I think it still is for most. Unfortunately, there’s a common view that it’s only about profits. Profits are secondary and come from doing a good job in helping others. Deliver value to your customers and the profits follow. This may seem like heresy to some! For more detailed thoughts on this keep an eye on my blog; I’ve been working on a post on the subject for weeks and still have a lot of work to do but it’ll appear eventually (this year).”
Why are you so passionate about customer excellence?
I’ve worked in customer service in one form or another since I was 16 when I started as a bus boy in a restaurant. At the time I didn’t understand how important it was but applied the basics even when others didn’t (which gained me a lot of respect and recognition from the waiters I worked with).
Later on, I ended up working in construction. Even there, I found treating everyone as a customer, including your boss and co-workers, gave me a definite advantage.
Finally, about 15 years ago, I retrained in IT and ended up in customer support. Over the years, my positive results in dealing with customers daily led me to manage customer support teams. But I missed dealing with customers!
I finally concluded that my best days were the ones where I had to deal with customer complaints. It allowed me to use all of my skills and bring about a positive outcome for both the customer and the company so I found work as a Customer Satisfaction Manager.
Through all of this I realized what a competitive advantage it could be for a company to excel at delivering excellent customer service. This along with my thoughts on respect and trust have made me an advocate of delivering an excellent customer experience.
It’s been a long process for me, I didn’t learn any of this in school, it’s all based on real-world experience and my own musings on the subject.”
Dawna: “Why should customer excellence be so important to an organization?”
Eric: “First, customer experience just “is”. It can be positive or negative; it can be planned or just happen, unfortunately, it “just happens” more often than not.
It’s important for organizations to understand the impact that the customer experience has on them and on their social environment. Only then can they make an informed decision on how they want to (or not) influence the outcome.
I’m not saying that every business should deliver excellent service; there’s no point. Some may simply decide that it isn’t important. It is important to understand the implications and make a value-based decision. There are companies (Walmart and Costco come to mind) that have successfully built their business on other differentiators and decided to minimize the customer service aspect and others will also take this route.
I firmly believe that planning and implementing a plan to deliver positive customer experiences has benefits but it definitely depends on the organization’s objectives. So I prefer to concentrate on those that want to understand and develop their plans to deliver excellent customer service. Everyone chooses their own path.”
Dawna: “How do you see yourself contributing to the ClienteerHub community over the journey?”
Eric: “I’m not sure yet. I’m relatively new to ClienteerHub and have primarily concentrated on finding ways to get my thoughts out there… I think the idea is great and it’s definitely another way to get the message out.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been wondering if I’m “preaching to the converted”. It always feels good to have others validate your thoughts but I’m looking for ways to engage businesses, especially those that haven’t necessarily given much thought to how the customer experience can affect them.
There’s a great community of people that advocate customer service on the Internet and I’m grateful to have met some of them and made a number of friends. ClienteerHub is an active part of this community.”
Eric: “Thank you Dawna for giving me this opportunity. We need to continue working on developing an understanding of the advantages to delivering great customer service and I really appreciate the chance to tell my story. Cheers!”
I have become a big fan of Eric and an avid follower of his blog. We now have an even deeper appreciation for his perspective on customer excellence. Huge thanks to Eric for sharing his passion with us.
Happy Friday everyone!