The best lines I have ever come across on customer service are from a non-business man. Quite surprisingly M.K.Gandhi, the crown jewel of Indian freedom struggle said thus: “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so”.
Some of my recent experiences (on the receiving end) helped me understand a bit more about customer service.
Customer service is a direct outcome of value that your company brings to the table. Value, as the definition goes, is always seen through the eyes of the customer. Come to think of restaurants that want to get famous for their “ample paring space” while caring the least about food and service. What about the “No. 1 Restaurant” in your locality which has lousy front office staff that considers their chores more important than attending you!
Customer service spans beyond the frontline. Customer service should percolate deeper into the organizational activities that have little or no customer touch point. Your demand generation chain is thoroughly and veritably impoverished if customer service is limited to the front line activity. If mere warm smiles and good handshakes delight customers, organizations need not list it as a core value or a source of competitive advantage. How many times have you not seen ‘friendly’ salesmen vanishing into the thin air after having got your signature on the dotted line? How many times have you not felt like giving a mouthful when the same company contacts you again for business? Instead, if your company is thinking of the customer while warehouse procurement strategy is being charted, be sure that it has something to say about customer service.
Customer service needs a different approach – not an alternate process. Great many times, your process can create/sustain this value. For the past few months, I have been trying to do a simple banking transaction. My bank has all the fancy customer service points like websites, telephone banking etc. But all that I wanted to talk to some physical entity – which I felt is essential for the transaction. To my utter dismay I realized that this is a luxury to ask for. Needless to say, I was taken through the technology enabled loops that kept adding to my frustration levels. I was denied the simple pleasure of talking to a frontline exec that could have given me a solution in less than a minute. If the process is designed to be a self-serve model to ensure scalability – what about the efficiency? And the woes of a hapless customer like me? If you are neither approachable nor have an easy /reliable technological alternative, why tout your customer service in the media?
Customer service is not just another advertisement theme. Until sometime back my telephone service provider had an option to speak to a customer service representative in the telephonic customer service menu. Recently, the option was removed – meaning you dissuade me from talking to you (may be it is unprofitable/inefficient). Guess what his tagline is? – “barriers vanish if we talk”!
Since every element of service happens at the cost of your resources (people in majority of the cases) incentives are essential. Basic human psychology tells us that “Incentives drive behavior and unrewarded behavioral patterns are no repeated”. The best designed customer service strategy collapses if you don’t reward the delivery agents amply and appropriately. After all, not all follow customer service as a religion.
Customer service is no more a loyalty building exercise. It is an exercise for existence in the over cluttered new-age market place.