About Me
Hello and welcome. My name is Eric Jacques.
Thank you for visiting this web site. I hope that we both get something out of it.
What’s the point of this site?
I’ve been working in customer service for many years in different roles and I’ve often found that the old adage about common sense not being so common applied. I believe that we all need to be reminded of the basics once in a while (yes, me too) and that sharing information is a great way to learn from each other.
I tried a few different options. Word of mouth is limited to the people you come in contact with regularly. So, the web seemed like a good way to get people thinking.
I tried a FaceBook group (Customer Excellence Forum) with the intent of starting discussions and had a number of my friends become members but weren’t participating… And, if they aren’t interested I’m not one to force it on them. I came to the conclusion that it would require a significant effort to get it “out there” and that FaceBook wasn’t necessarily the best venue for this dialogue.
I went on to try a Blogger account. This was better and had the advantage of being available via search engines. Hence, those who were interested could find it. But my effort was half-hearted; I didn’t like the site’s menu bar at the top, my lack of a domain name and the limited control. I’ll admit that I still wasn’t sure what I wanted it to be…
Then, in December 2008, I decided to invest in a domain name and a hosting plan. I had been recently laid off and thought that I might have some time to develop this project. It had been so long since I had been unemployed that I had forgotten that finding the “right” job is a full-time job.
But, I did get a site up using a content management system. This was OK when I had some flexibility in terms of hours. If you look at the posting dates, most happened in weeks leading up to my starting a new position.
Now, I’ve rebuilt the site using WordPress (after having done quite a bit of research and finally being “pushed” by a hacker). I find this much easier to use and plan to be more active. I also have a much better idea of what I want to do with it.
Why Customer Excellence?
We’ve been talking about customer satisfaction for decades now, but it’s never really been exciting has it? Do we really want to just be satisfied? It doesn’t seem like much of an objective. Being satisfied with the product or service should be the minimum expectation; no one will stand out by delivering it.
For a number of years we’ve been talking about the “customer experience”. Just great! (sic) This doesn’t tell anyone what we’re trying to accomplish, it sounds more like a description; and to top it off, the customer experience can be good or bad (even horribly bad) but it’s still an experience.
The term “customer experience” also seems dehumanizing to me; it reminds me of all the “quality” efforts of the 90s and early 2000s where the objective was to have repeatable processes. No creativity, no imagination, no humanity involved. Bring in the IVRs and any automated system you can find and when you do use a human being tell them to read from a script. ARGH!
So I came up with “Customer Excellence: From customer satisfaction to Customer Excellence”. It’s all about the quest to continuously deliver excellent products and services to customers that create value for those customers and ourselves.
Customers are internal and external and include end customers (those buying the product or service), employees, vendors, partners, etc.
To achieve this they must be driven towards excellence throughout the organisation with a strong customer focus. It must be a holistic approach and include processes, procedures, product quality and customer interactions.
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 organisational differentiator. Now we have to move towards customer excellence.
What else do I do?
The job that I do to pay the bills and keep my teenage daughters happy is as a Client Satisfaction Manager. I basically spend my days fixing customer interactions that have gone wrong. This usually starts with listening to a customer complain about how the company has wronged their organisation (B2B) and ends with me proposing, pushing and implementing process changes within my company. In between the two, I spend my time documenting, “harassing” overworked (not always) colleagues to do the work that was promised, delivering internal training, developing metrics, etc.
People often ask me why I do this job? Well, it turns out that after more than a decade in customer service where I ended up in management roles, I finally figured out that the best part of my day was when I spoke to unhappy customers (!) I like helping people and this gives me a sense of accomplishment using the varied skills that I’ve acquired over the years.
Where can I be found?
You can always contact me via LinkedIn. I’m also on Twitter occasionally.
Finally, there’s also email, just use ejacques [at] ericjacques [dot] org
Cheers!
April 18th, 2010
