Customer Satisfaction: Could Your Credit Union Do This?

Empowering employees to make a difference

The Ritz Carlton gives each and every employee $2,000 worth of discretionary funds that they're allowed to use in order to make their customers happy and solve disputes. Why? Because it’s part of their culture and a mission that says, “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.”

Just imagine, every employee is empowered to provide instant resolution to any guest’s problem, without the need to get a supervisor’s approval, spending up to $2,000! As I said, it begins at the top. But in every case we talked about top management wasn’t involved much at all. It’s the employees who made the call.

So, hire people who support your core values. Go beyond the resume and look for examples of how candidates care for customers, clients and even strangers. Who knows, you may even have your own legendary story of customer service in the making.

And if you’re looking for a business reason of why customer service is so important, I’ll leave you with this statistic:

One satisfied customer tends to tell one person about their experience. And unfortunately, one very dissatisfied customer will tell eight people. But here’s the good news: one very satisfied customer will tell six people about their experience.