Excellence in Customer Service

At this point in your life, it is a safe bet to state you have either provided customer service or been on the receiving end of customer service.?? You likely have identified what a good customer service experience looks and feels like as opposed to a poor customer service experience.?? Organizations spend millions of dollars to ensure the interactions between their customers and their employees are positive and reflect on the brand and future business of the organization.?? Some organizations have chosen to reduce costs and have transferred to offshore call centers.?? In some cases, this has saved organizations the expense of utilizing domestic employees who require higher wages.??? What is often missed is the customer’s experience may end in a result trying to deal with an offshore representative that the organization would likely would not desire. In other cases, organizations that have decided to keep their service departments domestic often have the same undesired outcomes due to inadequate training, poor personnel selection, or lack of understanding the importance of customer service. The difference between undesired results offshore and domestic is domestic results are at higher labor expenditures.

A recent personal example of such an experience happened in the past week.?? Our company had an issue arise with one of our vendors and to resolve the issue, we contacted our vendor’s customer service department and placed a ticket to get the issue resolved.??? After three days with no resolution, we contacted the customer service department, and we were greeted by an individual we will call “Lydia”.?? One important note, to reach someone in the customer service department, you have to enter your identification number.??? Lydia greeted us with a heavy accent which was difficult to understand but manageable.?? We explained the situation and the fact that a ticket from three days ago had been unresolved.?? Without asking permission, Lydia stated she had to confirm our identity and placed us on hold for over twenty minutes with very loud music on a repeat cycle.?? It became clear, Lydia was waiting us out and she won.?? We ended the call and dialed back in.?? This time we were greeted by an individual we will refer to as “Hudson”.?? We started by asking Hudson to not place us on hold as we had previously waited for over twenty minutes.? We again explained our situation and that a ticket was entered with no resolution.?? Hudson hung up the phone.?? It is possible that the line was disconnected, so we will give Hudson the benefit of the doubt, but we are now not feeling great about our experience with the vendor’s customer service department.?? A third call to the department was answered by a gentleman we will refer to as “Paolo”.??? We explained to Paolo that this was our third call and the previous two calls had put us on hold for over twenty minutes and the other disconnected.?? We explained what our situation was again and how a ticket had gone unresolved.?? Paolo’s response was he could enter another ticket.?? Essentially indicating I cannot resolve your issue, but I can send it off to a queue for someone else to try and solve it.?? He was asked what time frame we should expect to hear back.?? Paolo’s response was it should be five hours.?? The call was ended, and we were left feeling the vendor company does not truly value us as a client.?? After sixteen hours, the vendor company contacted us indicating we would have to restart the process.??? We made the determination to take care of the issue through another method and to discontinue our business relationship with the vendor.

This example has several takeaways to learn from on both sides of the equation.?? First, if you are selecting a company to do business with, ask at the front end about their customer service and resolution process.?? More than likely, you will have a problem at some point in the future and it is better to know what to expect before you have the problem than during the problem.?? Secondly, evaluate what is the cost to your own organization or mental health if you are subject to a poor customer service process.??? Third, experiencing customer service from another organization exposes you to what a good or bad experience is and how it makes you feel.?? This can provide you with valuable lessons on how to refine your own customer service.??? In the above example, I took the time to share our experience with the CEO of the vendor.?? The sole purpose was to bring awareness to how their clients are being served by their customer service department and for him to evaluate for himself whether or not this is helping or hurting his company.?? A realization that he lost us as a client should help him understand if we are leaving over this experience, maybe other clients have or will as well.?

To wrap up, some key points we share with our team about customer service:

1)????? Listen for the purpose of understanding.

2)????? Clarify your understanding of the customer’s reasons for contact.

3)????? Acknowledge and empathize with the client.

4)????? Be factual, realistic, and truthful in establishing expectations.

5)????? Provide prompt feedback and status updates on resolutions.

6)????? If a problem is not feasible to resolve, explain why and offer an alternative.

7)????? If a problem is feasible to resolve, resolve the problem. Don't put it off to someone else.

8)????? Communicate with the customer after the situation is resolved to ensure the resolution was to their satisfaction.

9)????? Share the situation with the entire team and brainstorm ways to mitigate the problem from reoccurring.

10)? Take a proactive approach to communicating resolutions to all the clients and ensuring a high level of service is a cornerstone of everything we do.