Customer Service

The quality of a business’ customer service, is to its customers one of the most visible and significant aspects of organisational performance. Many organisations however, find customer service is one of the most challenging and neglected areas of management. For your customers, the quality of customer service determines whether to buy, and more importantly, whether to remain a customer.  Customers are the people or organisations that support your business. They support the business by exchanging, mainly money, for utilising your goods or services.

Customers can be external or internal to the organisation and if you think about it, even your colleagues or workmates who work in different areas of the company are really customers to you. 

Successful companies listen to the customer, research and understand their customer’s needs. They are aware of the customer's interests and changing trends in the marketplace and respond accordingly.

Successful companies:   

• Are in constant communication with their customers to ask opinions of their products or services.
• Ask questions of their customers to determine any unhappiness or discontent. 
• Are always probing to find a potential to future opportunities the customer may be in need of now or later. 
• Know who their customers are and where they come from.
• Collect data and analyse information that keeps them informed of their customer’s requirements and the criteria they have to purchase within. 
• Make their customers aware that their opinions are valuable to the organisation and often used in development of better services. 
• Regularly gather information that allows them to research and develop other opportunities to add value to their client base.

Can you remember a time when you were buying a product in a store, and the service you received was ordinary? Or when you got the product home you were unhappy with the contents or even its packaging. Perhaps you had your car serviced at a dealer and even though most of us can’t tell the type of products that were used, you had an experience with the mechanic that was below your expectations. Each of these occasions contributes to our perception of how good a company is. 

If that experience was memorable for you, then what are the customers in the company you work for saying about you and your company?

The significance of customer service is often underplayed by senior managers in larger organisations. Let alone the need to design and establish measurable customer service standards that are monitored regularly. This oversight leads to a ripple effect of things like high staff turnover and unhappy customers that leave without notice. If staff are given clear standards and constant feedback about their performance, this would generally empower them to job satisfaction levels that keep the customer returning and keeps the staff member on top of their game. Our own experiences as customers, demonstrate regularly that organisations fail regularly to keep good people and retain customers.

I can hear some people saying “yeah but price is the main reason customers don’t stay”. Sure pricing strategy is one of the six main reasons why a customer does not return, but it rates quite low in importance. 

The encouraging challenge in this information is that the top five reasons are somewhat out of our control. The major one though is completely within our control which means we can have direct input into a decrease in that percentage (68%) in our business. 

More next issue!