Customer service should not only be limited to the business world or our workplaces but spread across various fields of endeavor. In light of this, we should appreciate learning to improve ourselves and adopt an attitude of excellence as far as customer service is concerned. With the numerous benefits customer service brings, a bad approach towards it can wreck an organization like it did in the case of United Airlines, which lost about 1.4 million dollars after rendering poor customer service to Canadian Musician Dave Carroll in 2009. This presupposes that unimproved customer service can curtail success in our career, business, ministry, organization, and several others.
This situation draws our attention to the need for customer service training in our various fields of endeavor. With Ghana fast becoming a destination for tourists, explorers, and business moguls all over the world, our level of customer service needs to be one of the best on the globe. One that encapsulates excellence, trustworthiness, and security.
A customer can be defined as a person who purchases our products or services, as well as people who call to inquire about our products or services.
Businesses are built to attract and retain customers. Identifying the needs of a customer and meeting these needs are what keep businesses running. Some of the advantages of customer service excellence include socialization, learning new creative ideas, and innovative skills, interacting with high-class personalities, and several others which add value to the person.
Customers go through various stages to finally choose a particular product or service they need. Employers and employees, in their quest to improve customer service excellence, need to appreciate these psychological processes customers go through in order to realize the need to treat them with optimum care and respect.
Before awareness of a product or service is created and registered in the minds of potential buyers, a lot of money goes into the process that churns out TV ads, ad spaces in newspapers, branding souvenirs, etc so practicing exceptional customer service is comparatively a cheaper way to stay on the minds of your customers.
The lifetime value of a customer is worth more than the immediate returns they bring. The recommendations they give to people after enjoying good services from you are worth more than the money they paid for the service. Just as they share the good news about your services, they are even quicker to share bad experiences and be assured that bad news travels further.
Human as we are, we might still fall out with some customers. When that happens, what do we do? Customer recovery!
Customer recovery has to do with how a business entity reacts to customers’ dissatisfaction and frustration. Complaint management has been considered an important tool for managers to use to deal with failures, especially in the service sector. Henry Ford said, “Employers only handle the money; it is the customer who pays the wages.”
Once employees understand this quote, they appreciate customers and treat them as they deserve. As indicated in the story of Canadian musician Dave Carroll, if the United Airlines employees had managed the frustrations of the musician properly, he would not have felt the need to express his frustrations through the song that led to the airline losing that huge amount of money after the video went viral.
Customers who have had service failures are more loyal if the situation is handled well than customers who have not had any service failures. For instance, a customer spends the night in a hotel and mistakenly leaves his wallet with vital ID cards behind after check out. He calls back to complain, and the hotel immediately responds by finding the wallet with all vital IDs intact. The loyalty of that client increases because he finds the hotel trustworthy.
It is prudent to take customer feedback seriously taking into consideration that the customer is always right.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”- Maya Angelou
Tony Hsieh said, “Customer service shouldn’t just be a department but it should be the entire organization”.
