This is what we desire, we hope to experience any time all the time. But is it possible?

Last week, Phil Gerbyshak of Make it Great! shared a less-than-thrilling Starbucks experience. Many reacted and some said that Starbucks should develop a system that allows it to give consistent good service and high-quality coffee.

I for one pointed out that I hear about and experience good service from Starbucks, and that they just need to be consistent. Phil replied that maybe I could write about “how” to give consistently good customer service.

When you have a chain like Starbucks, it’s a bit hard to ensure consistent service and quality. But nothing is difficult when you have a good system in place. It’s all in the system, and this system is developed often over a period time, and is continually updated.

In the book, Unleashing Excellence: The Complete Guide to Ultimate Customer Service, one way to be consistent in what you do is to adopt a service philosophy and service standards. Through these philosophy and standards, you communicate to your employees that there are “non-negotiables” in the business. You cannot allow unfriendly, unsmiling, even unhappy people to be working for your business. You must act in such a way that every employee will ask himself, “what’s expected of me?”

In a nutshell, the service philosophy communicates what you as a company believes about customer service, and service standards are the rules of engagement (or implementing guidelines) for providing customer service. To develop this sytem, you need to coach your employees every step of the way.

My succeeding posts will talk about each one in detail.