Perspective on Customer Service Today

Providing excellent, and memorable, client support is important for client retention. Without exceptional support, your clients will not return. Average or mediocre support won’t keep your customers either, and bad customer service will simply drive them away. As a business owner or manager, you need to ensure that your business is focused on understanding “what is good customer service” and how to define customer service. With that understanding in place, you can work on building and maintaining great customer service, and high customer satisfaction levels.

If a customer is satisfied that means that a product of service has met his expectations and that he was not dissatisfied by it. Customer satisfaction is doubtlessly very important, and it is the precondition for repeat purchases and it prevents the customer from telling others about his disappointing experiences. A loyal customer, however, is more than a customer who frequently purchases from a company. Any serious effort to manage customer perceptions starts with a good measurement system.

Companies must be truly willing to look at the whole process of interaction through the customers eyes. An upset customer calls, using profane language on the phone. The man indicates your business can never do anything right, and it is difficult to maintain your temper and a positive attitude when an irate customer directs their anger and frustration at you. Most people take the experience personally and immediately become defensive, and often this only exasperates a difficult situation and makes it worse.

CVS “Samaritan Vans” Did you know that CVS has been patrolling the streets and highways for the past 30 years, looking to help stranded motorists? The Consumerist has a story of a woman stranded on a busy highway with a flat tire, and a CVS Good Samaritan van rolled up five minutes later and helped change her tire, and the cost for the service was only her sending in a comment card to CVS. Make it easy and convenient for customers and employees to offer feedback.

I think that the best management information comes from the point of experience, where your customers and employees do their thing. For me this is where your company lives yet it’s something too many managers never see or hear or feel, I think. Capture this priceless information by creating easy and quick ways for your staff and customers to give you feedback, and then acknowledge the feedback you receive, appreciate it and do something with it or they’ll stop sending it your way. Feedback is priceless!