The need to revamp Customer Service?
Seth Godin states that customer service is broken. He is proposing a solution, but hopes you bear with him for more paragraphs.
Well, I almost didn't after reading his three observations on why Customer Service is broken.
- The internet has taught us to demand everything immediately (and perfect)
- The rapid proliferation of choice has taught us to demand that everything should be cheap
- The availability of blogs and other public histories means that it is harder than ever to treat different customers differently, words get out.
First thought I had: no sorry, don't agree with that, we encounter many, many businesses who have excellent customer service. So excellent service that we don't mind we have to wait more than a day for the correct product arrives. And we are more than willing to pay the correct price for the correct quality of product/service (it pays in the end). And it does work to treat every individual as individual, only one word will get out: proper 'wrapped' service.
And not only on the suppliers side, our customers tell us we're a good supplier with excellent customer service too ;-)
Then I did read the next bits and found that all these businesses we deal with are doing what Seth Godin proposes as The Fix (although IMO he forgets one major point I will come back to later)
Given the choice between amazing, guaranteed service with a one day
wait or interminable waits on hold with people who can't really help
you right now... well, the choice is pretty easy.
Make sure your staff is trained to deal with enquiries, complaints etc efficiency.
Main item Seth forgets: make quality your passion. Quality in products, quality in service, quality in recruiting quality personnel, quality in everything. Be so passionated about it that your customers become passionate about you.
It works Seth; it works for us and for most of our suppliers.
