Defining Customer Service The RIGHT Way

Posted by Deborah Chaddock Brown on October 27, 2009 under Customer Moments, Expectations | Be the First to Comment

I had an aha moment a few months back.  In all this talk about customer service and building relationships and earning customer’s loyalty I suddenly asked myself:

“Who decides what great customer service looks like?”

In every company I’ve been with, a team of executives and operational leaders will sit around a room and decide how many rings the phone should go before answering and how many seconds a customer coming into a store must be greeted within and what greeting the employee should use.  But has anyone ever actually asked the customer what is important to them? 

Do they care if we answer the phone by the third ring if, when we answer, it is with a curt “Hello, Burger Town, what do you want?” or worse yet “Hello and thank you for calling Burger Town, home of the double stacked burger made just the way you want it where for a limited time only you can get two burgers for the price of one, how can I help you?”

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered how often businesses ask the customer what is important to them.  We may be establishing policies and measuring success for our employees against something the customer could care less about.

In this article, How Do You Define Customer Service, I expand my thoughts on customer service and determining what we should be striving to do based on what the customers finds valuable.

But in the meantime – HOW DO YOU DEFINE CUSTOMER SERVICE?  As a customer does great customer service vary depending on the type of shopping/business transaction or are there a few basic must-haves.  As a business executive – what do you expect every customer to receive and how did you determine those criteria?

Please share – I’d love to hear.