Service needs to go back to basics.

I know I know, most people think service is getting better. I'm not one of them. In fact, I think with all the gadgets and gizmos that were put in place to ostensibly make service better have not just made service worse. The service technology box has been checked but customers are still suffering from a lack of love and SIS (Service Irritation Syndrome). I think what has got better is the marketing and the promises that CEOs make about the commitment to customers and service. It's plastered all over their communication pieces, it sounds great on the recorded message, but when you really need to get help, the experience is usually dismal.

We laugh about it mostly - we expect banks to never respond to service requests, we expect to be the ones waiting for minutes on end while we listen to the stretched recording stating 'your business is important to us', and we are supposedly comfortable when companies give us a service window of between 9-4! I'm not being grumpy, I'm just flabbergasted that we allow companies to get away with this. In a report done by Accenture, 66% of consumers switched brands or business due to poor customer service, and remarkably 82% of those said it could have been prevented if the company had just reached out .. actually just cared.

With companies still losing more than $62 billion due to poor customer service, it's no wonder that 72% of companies maintain that this is a top priority to solve. But how? Get back to basics. Stop being a magpie.

Years back I read an article about Brilliant Basics and why they matter in Customer Service. As basic as these sound, most companies are still not doing this. Start here before you by another piece of technology to fix the relationship.

You may have read it too, but just a little reminder of 4 key lessons:

Lesson 1: Services need to meet the customer's basic needs. In the event of a problem, empower agents to solve the problem and not pass it back to the customer

Lesson 2: Poor service leads to customers switiching. If you don't resolve the issue, customers engage in "negative word of mouth".

Lesson 3: Unless you make process improvements, no processes will be improved

Lesson 4: The customer doesn't care about your internal procedures. Working processes need to be followed and broken processes need to be fixed. If you can do something the week before, refusing to do the same thing a week later just makes you look incompetent.

Sources: Article: Shep Hyken of Forbes quoting Forrester 2016, and NewVoiceMedia; Accenture Global Consumer Pulse Survey; Article by Jason Price, Customer Contact Weekly Digital,