Real Customer Service Problems
This essay outlines what customer service really is and what are the problems associated with it. To understand these problems let us first understand how to define Customer service. Customer service is that process by which a company provides services, provisions to its customers during a purchase, after the purchase is done and even prior to the purchase. How important a customer is depends upon the deliverance of the type of product or service involved. The success of customer service depends upon the employees who can accustom themselves to what the customers want and give them a service based on that.
Thus, if the customer is satisfied, the customer service flourishes. Further, it becomes important to understand the dilemmas that can be faced while serving a customer. The first real problem with customer service is this that, while serving the customer, organizations end up in a trap rather than actually giving the customer the substance of the service. Secondly, the tools and techniques used to serve the customer better are misused on a wider scale. And, it so appears that these tools are used to serve the symptom and not the proper sickness.
An example can be quoted here of the hospitals that people run for children. These organizations also believe in customer service and because of that they paint the walls of the children’s ward with clowns and animals and other things that they think might cheer up the kids. But what actually happened is, that rather than making the things therapeutic in nature for the children, they end up making the children scared as the children are more scared of clowns and animals than needles and medicines. Thus, here a better customer service would be to leave the walls as plain.
A failure to providing proper customer service always results in a low customer loyalty, a low satisfaction of the customer and hence a bad reputation of the organization that causes a huge loss. Hence, the proper elements in customer service lie in the fact that which parts of customer service are important and which parts are to be neglected. Also, the services should be provided to those customers who value them and not to those who do not value them. Therefore, an alignment is to be maintained between the capabilities of service that are to be provided to the customer as well as the strategies of market that are being maintained.
