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Profiles International
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Walking the Customer Service Walk
Walking the Customer Service Walk
A How-Not-To and A How-To
In spite of terrifying tales about bad customer service (many amplified to thousands of people, thanks to the internet), the horror stories continue and have inspired this sure-fire philosophy for driving away customers:
- Never talk to your customers. Keep them on hold on the phone, and don’t answer their e-mails. Tie them up in voice mail so that they never get to talk to a real person
- If they persist in calling to speak to a human being, make sure they get transferred so that they have to repeat their problem again and again
- Make them stand in a long line each time they visit your business
- Tell your salespeople that it isn’t important for them to know about your products, and don’t ever empower a salesperson to solve a problem
- Reward and reinforce the salesperson’s surly attitude by never correcting it
- Don’t trust customers, for they are never right. If they tell you your product is defective, assume the problem is their fault.
The old adage about customers voting with their feet has never been more true. And that kind of fancy footwork is a threat to every business, as finding a new customer costs 10 times more than retaining an existing one. All of us must take a hard look at customer service because the problems are not unique to any one business or industry; you can find them in banking, retail, health care, insurance and airlines.
Yet some companies still don’t get it. They hire the wrong people, or choose the ‘self-service’ customer service model, or make customer service someone else’s problem and call it outsourcing. They penny-pinch, convinced they are saving money, when in reality they are losing customers and may eventually lose their business. Meanwhile, they hang up a sign that says, “Customers Come First” and hope that their employees get it.
The bad news is that no one ever gets anything from a sign like that; it’s not that easy. The good news is that hiring the right people and training them is not just highly possible, but can also make your organisation hum like a well-tuned engine.
As with any top-flight professional practice, good customer service starts with a set of standards or values that the company wants employees to embrace when serving customers. Then our managers hire the people who most closely match those standards.
Profiles assessments help identify job candidates whose attitudes match ours. Ideally, we all want to hire workers with the customer service “soul” imprinted on them – but it’s not as obvious as Harry Potter’s lightning bolt; you can't see this imprint just by looking at, or even listening to, someone.
Furthermore, once the right person is in the right position, managers can’t just walk away, believing their job is done. The best companies offer employees continued, focused customer service training. As we all try to remain competitive while retaining customers, we must remember that people, both the customer and the one serving the customer, are the most important ingredients in the business ‘recipe’.
By all means, we should use every available technological advance to further our goals in this increasingly complicated world. But in our haste, we cannot forget the people part. Because, as one infuriated blogger wrote, “Without customers, there is no business.”
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