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Everybody is nuts about customers today, but it wasn’t always that way. For most of our business history, customers were seen as minor annoyances who had to be persuaded to buy what the company was producing. But in the 1970’s and 1980’s global competition heated up at the same time customers were becoming more sophisticated and demanding, and suddenly everyone discovered customers. It’s as if one day an executive came out of an office, looked around and ran back in shouting, “There are customers out there! There are customers out there!” Word got around pretty fast, and people began to think that if there are customers, they must be important to business. Consultants made millions telling companies to pay attention to customers, and the money is still rolling in because even after all the books, the speeches, and the training programs - companies are still struggling to get it right. The problem is, even with all the honest efforts to improve service, many companies are neglecting key actions necessary to make customer service work, and worse yet, are unwittingly doing other things that actually prevent them from giving top-notch service. They are committing the Seven Deadly Sins of Customer Service: How many of these is your company guilty of? Maybe a lot of them; most
companies are.
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Putting
customer-contact people in the cellar. Paying them the lowest rate and
putting them at the lowest level in the organisation.
Not having
standards for customer-contact people. (“Oh, you want me to get off the phone and wait on the customers?”)
Not
empowering them to make decisions for customers, and not training them in
problem solving and other customer service skills.
Not
insisting that management gets involved with customers and leads by example.
Not
asking customers what they want.
Allowing
company procedures to get in the way of good service.
Measuring
service levels against competitors rather than against what they could be,
there by settling for “good enough.”
