Can we just break things down for a hot moment and talk about something so vital to a business that it could easily make or break a business no matter how big or small it may be? It might seem like something so simple and basic and something anyone with common sense would know, but it’s astounding how often that is not the case.
What are we talking about? Customer service!
Unfortunately, we can all swap more stories of straight up bad and downright awful customer service. There are the stories where you get transferred to a call center outside of America and can’t understand the person speaking to you. Then there’s the ones with the customer service representatives who get an attitude with you and are downright rude. And there are those where the customer service is plain useless because the person on the other end isn’t really interested in helping you or doesn’t know the ins and outs of their job. Let’s also not forget those times where you have to go through a million prompts before you ever reach a human and sometimes even after all that, you still don’t get through. There is nothing more frustrating is there?
It doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense either. Customer service can very easily turn away clients or customers just as easily as it can gain them. Probably more often than not, people leave a company and the services they offer because of how difficult the customer service can be. Large companies often have the prompts people have to dial through or put you on hold for quite some time with bad background music, but it’s become the standard these days. It’s irritating, but it is what it is and something we just have to adapt to. But why settle for that when calling say, your local bank branch, or local phone company or even just another small business?
There really should be no bad customer service within a small business should there? It’s the locals within town that make your business thrive, so why not go the little extra mile by showing them how much they really mean to you? This isn’t too difficult to do either! All it takes is the golden rule you learned as a grade school kid: treat others as you’d like to be treated.
Isn’t it more fun to trade stories with your friends about a company you loved not only because of their product or service, but because the people you also encounter are polite, professional, helpful, and seem to have a genuine smile on their face? Crazy right, how little it takes to accomplish great customer service?!
People like to be treated as exactly that, people. As the Discover credit card commercials display, when you’re talking with customer service, you want to speak with someone personable, and in fact another person, not a machine. Who would’ve thought that in this day in age we’d have issues reaching a human when so many devices have been created for that exact concept?
