Customer Service is the vanguard of any business. Customer service means being genuinely engaged with your customer, smiling, giving, forgiving and pleasing.
When a company employs new staff it shouldn't have to say to them: give the customer outstanding customer service; the words "customer service" should mean outstanding and everyone in the organization, from the top down should know this.
It is after all common sense isn't it? Every single person in a company is also a customer when he/she steps out of the company's portal. The words: "Treat customers as if you are talking to yourself and then some." should prevail throughout any transaction with a customer.
It amazes me how many companies ignore, become irritated, or pay little attention to complaints. If one person complains you can be assured that there were others who didn't openly complain but voiced their frustration to others about poor customer service or lack thereof…possibly never using that company's product or service again.
Too many think its no big deal to lose one customer/client when there are millions more to fill that person's place. Are there? Of course there are. In a country of millions what difference does it make if a few customers are unhappy?
In the short term it may not make a difference but there will be a tipping point and a company will begin to lose sales and revenue. In the scramble to justify this loss everything other than customer service will be blamed.
I have written several letters over the years to the CEO's of various companies to complain about customer service. Yes, I did get a call back from someone in the company to help me with that particular situation but did it help the company? No. It just carried on doing the same rotten things without learning that if one person complained there were others with the same complaint who didn't. Can the company not see that it isn't just about fixing my complaint; it is about fixing the reason for the complaint.
Also, even when I get a call back from some minnow in a company to help me, it oftentimes, didn't mean that the complaint was satisfactorily resolved. The company remained in the dark about this unless I made another call. No one on a higher level had been assigned to make a courtesy call to enquire if my complaint had been resolved. In fact, they sometimes put the burden on me to call back if I wasn't entirely happy with their second attempt. What? I had to give them a third crack at providing the customer service that should have been mine to begin with?
I have found that the further the chain of command gets from the founder or CEO in large companies, chains and franchises, the worse the customer service is. Smaller businesses have their own poor qualities and their problem is often rooted in the owner himself not being a people-person or like the large companies, employing the wrong frontline people to begin with. Not everyone has the smile, the energy or the countenance to charm the customer.
Sometimes the company itself gives the employee something untenable to work with and then the lack of empathy from the employee is a further egregious act. Let me explain.
A little while back I had the privilege to do quite a bit of first class flying because my son was an airline employee and as his parent, I got free stand-by travel benefits. Now we all know that travelling first class is pretty expensive. A first class ticket to London for instance can run around $3,500 as opposed to about $600 economy. Paying $3,500 for a ticket would certainly entitle you to great service don't you think? Not so. A gentleman, booked in first class, who boarded last, was given a choice of beef or chicken for the main meal by the flight attendant. He chose beef. The flight attendant disappeared to the galley but then returned to his seat a few minutes later and in a gruff, unsmiling, uncaring manner said: "Sorry sir we are out of beef, I'm going to have to put you down for chicken."
Eh? I was horrified. I waited for the man to complain but he politely nodded his head in acceptance. I felt more outraged than it appeared he did. How can an airline be out of beef for a first class passenger? Someone who has paid $3,500, just like all the others in first class, but because he boarded last he was not going to get his choice, beef. How outrageous.
The thing is, it wasn't just a one-off occurrence that this airline couldn't fulfill the request of a first class passenger. On the return journey some two weeks later I witnessed the exact same scenario but with a different passenger and a different flight attendant. This time the flight attendant was a little less gruff, smiled apologetically but yet still did not go out of her way to offer a little more than "well you can't have beef, so, now, all there is, is chicken".
She could have been a whole lot more apologetic. She could have brought him the menu, made some suggestions like perhaps a double helping of chicken or asked if there was anything else she could get him to make up for such an oversight. She could really have shown, not only him, but all the other passengers witnessing this scene that this was not a regular occurrence and that she and her company were deeply sorry for this inconvenience.
Both these employees should have made this a big issue with their airline when they landed to make sure this never happened again. Somehow I doubt that either of them did anything.
As for the gentleman who simply nodded at being told he couldn't have beef, I stood in line with him for our baggage and we got talking. I found out that he was a business executive and a frequent first class flyer and that he intended to avoid that particular airline whenever he could in the future.
If he was prepared to tell me this, a perfect stranger, I wonder how many friends he conveyed his dissatisfaction to.
Customer service is exactly that. Serving the customer in every which way to make the customer like us - no, love us - and use us or buy from us over and over again and then tell their friends about how much faith they have in us so that they in turn, try us and use us or buy from us over and over again. Actually, it should be plain common sense.