Hi, John O’Connor here again to give you some insight into the reasoning and impact of our core values. It’s pretty much common practice in business to have, in theory at least, a set of core values. Some companies say that improving customer experience is a top strategic priority; however, a majority of those firms are ill-equipped to achieve their customer experience targets. Having values that read great might be a priority for some but that’s not what concerned us here at Kollect. We figured early on that competition is everywhere, every market is crowded, so it’s not just about what you do anymore but also how you do it.
Customer service shouldn’t be a section of the company, it should be the backbone of all departments. We figured If you can deliver simple services at a fair price and give your customers a positive and authentic experience while you do it, then hey—build it and they will come as they say. The first step in creating a customer-centric culture is instilling such values in the company’s vision and mission statement. The next step is to engage and empower employees to take it to the next step, which is to please customers beyond expectation.
Here is a brief insight into our core values and how they provide us with a solid foundation for our business to grow.
Exceed Expectations: Deliver Wow through Customer Service
Obsessing about how we can improve our customer experience is something we discuss hourly. As I explained in last week’s post we brought the same attitude to the first 10 customers as we did the last 1,000 and that’s pretty special. We have an internal channel called WOW and UNWOW. Every department posts a detailed note of the shortfall, issues, complaint or feedback from customers in the UNWOW channel. We discuss and review what went wrong the previous day in all departments and what processes we can introduce to fix the any mistakes and deliver a better service. We spend 40 hours plus each week just understanding where we let customers down or how we can improve their experience. At Kollect everything we try to do with a WOW. We always go over and above for our customers and when we do we put these in the WOW channel. We like to do hundreds of wows each month and are always encouraging our team to improve. This can include free pizza, junk removal, bin collection for a year or even a weekend away. People don’t expect it and it’s just a small token of our appreciation.
Be Authentic, Positive, with a Can-Do Attitude
We’ve all had that experience before where the person serving you has to refer to somebody else who then has to refer to another person before a decision is made. Well we didn’t want that. We hire our employees because they buy into the value of customer service, so we trust them to make decisions and look out for the customers’ interests at large. We also don’t use scripts. How are we supposed to deliver authentic customer service is we treat every single customer the same? We couldn’t. For us, it’s about trusting our employees to be themselves and always put the customer first.
Honest: Be Straight Up, Always do right by our Customers
This one pretty much does what it says on the tin. We’re human, our customers are human—we all make mistakes. There’s usually a kind of party line policy when things go wrong in business, you know, something that keeps everyone in the dark until the real problem is fixed quietly. We don’t believe in that. It’s unfortunate but mistakes happen. We always take ownership of our mistakes and strive to make it up to the customer in whatever way we can.
Responsive: Be Prompt, Always Keeping Customers in the Loop
This one is simple too but really is a vital component of our style. Whatever attempt customers make to contact us they do it for a reason, so we won’t leave them waiting around. Sometimes the individual can get lost in the bureaucracy of big companies and we work hard to make sure that never happens. Whatever it is—we’re on it, and we’ll get back to you promptly right up to 11 pm each and every night. Our average response time is one minute, something we are very proud of.
So that’s us. Thanks for taking the time to read about the reasoning behind our daily practices. Our style is important to us and we work hard to make sure we continue to deliver our services in Kollect’s unique way.