Kevin Stirtz

Customers have spoken and the New Jersey Turnpike Authority (NJTA) has listened. The NJTA claims to have very few customer complaints, 1 for every 540,000 transactions. But a public din arose recently when several dozen of these complaints were posted on the website of a local news organization.

The outcome is, the NJTA has developed an action plan to improve customer service. Isn’t it wonderful what a little transparency will do for an organization?

I applaud the NJTA for taking this bull by the horns and committing to improvement. Here are some of their specific plans with my comments and suggestions to be even more successful.

1. Annual customer service training

“Greatly increasing the frequency of customer service training for toll collectors. An annual training program will be instituted over the next six weeks. Previously, employees received training when they were hired and were retrained only if there were specific...

Customer evangelism is something big companies and marketing consultants have talked about for years. Too often though, the big companies get all the attention in this area. People assume small and mid-sized companies can’t create customer evangelists. But they’re wrong! Here are four things you can do to create customer evangelists.

1. Talk to your customers

Have real person-to-person conversations with as many customers as you can. If you have a lot of customers relative to your employees then you’ll need to prioritize. But find ways to have real, meaningful and ongoing conversations with them. This might mean inviting some to lunch. It might mean hosting get-togethers at your business. It might start with a survey and end with a phone call or a meeting. For others it might be virtual conversations using email or Web 2.0 tools.

2. Serve their needs

Of course you’re doing this to make your company better. But...

A while back I attended a seminar geared toward helping us manage change better in our organizations. One of the many things worth remembering from that day is a phrase from Larry Wilson:

The natural state of communication is misunderstanding.

At first I didn’t understand what Larry meant. Lucky for me he continued to explain. What he said was we typically misunderstand more of what we hear than we actually understand. We might think we know what the other person meant but often we don’t.

An example:

A friend of mine works at a manufacturer where the boss let it be known he wanted every machine in the plant busy every day. So the plant manager staffed every machine every day and ran them no matter how much work they had. As a result they paid more in labor and other costs than if they just ran the machines they needed based on the orders they had.

The boss meant he wanted enough orders coming in to keep...

Our Amazing customer service resource for this week is a post at the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur called: “60 Customer Service Tips for Entrepreneurs”. It was written by TPE’s Mike Michalowicz but actually consists of tips from dozens of bright people.

Here are a few of my favorites:

4. Be You, Not a Script – Get off the script—LISTEN and respond to what’s really going on.
-Shel Horowitz

7. Don’t Make ‘Em Wait – Never keep a customer...