Creating a Robust Customer Service Culture for Customer Satisfaction.

Customer Satisfaction.

After a company has created value, marketed it and sold it to the customer, the customer experiences the value in three ways:

? The value falls short of what was promised and fails to meet customer expectations.

? The value matches what was promised and meets customer expectations.

? The value surpasses what was promised and not only meets customer expectations but also gets them hooked.

Some companies manage to match their customers’ expectations at the outset of their operation. This is every company’s wish.

However good this may be, the ultimate goal of most companies is to surpass their customer’s expectations. Any company ran by ambitious, visionary people continues aiming for this end.

Some companies manage to surpass these expectations at the outset. These are the outliers. Getting everything right the first time is never easy.

Most companies fail to match their customer’s expectations at the beginning of their operation.

Unfortunately, some of these companies play con games that aim to exploit people in the short term. These companies aim to exit when they have maximized their opportunities

While this may sometimes be the case, most companies are well meaning and are playing the long game. They even expect their products to fall short of their customers’ expectations at the outset.

Feedback and customer service.

The goal of these companies is to collect as much feedback from customers as possible to improve their solution over time.

How such a company handles complaints against their solution, is a determinant of whether the customers will return or not and whether the company will soon close shop or not.

This may appear to put the companies in a fragile position. But far from it. These friction points present an opportunity for the company to be robust.

Complaints if well handled may even make the company antifragile. This is the opposite of fragility. If well handled, the customer feels valued as they give feedback. Such customers are likely to return and bring referrals.

This reveals that where a company fails to create customer satisfaction initially via the value they have created, they can create value via good customer service as they work on improving their solution.

Good customer service is a useful tool for not only gathering feedback but also for customer retention.

Exceptional Customer Service for optimization.

I have always been impressed by the Starbucks LATTE model for handling friction points. It stands for Listen, Acknowledge, Take action, Thank and Explain.

If you take a close look at the model, you will see that most of it is targeted at making the customer feel valued.

It starts with Listening. This is the first part of making the customer feel valued.

It is followed by the Acknowledgement of their feedback, of how the product or the service has fallen short of their expectations.

This is followed by Taking action, Thanking the customer for the feedback, and Explaining to the customer why and how the product fell short of their expectations.

The model as you can see, focuses on the customer's psychological and emotional needs following dissatisfaction as much as it focuses on improving.

The customer gets to feel heard and their issue is not diminished. The explaining part at the end of LATTE amplifies how valued they are made to feel.

They get to hear what part of the process of value delivery failed and how it will be resolved going forward.

A company that understands that it will initially fail to meet customers’ expectations leverages on this kind of customer care to create value.

This kind of customer service works like wildfires. Wildfires use the obstacles in their way to grow even bigger.