I have a friend and occasional wise sage of business who says we provide Customer Service that is too good. This got me to thinking, is it possible to provide customer service that is too good?? Can it be that by constantly trying to go "above and beyond" for our customers we are not helping them to help themselves??
I know that for me personally I value customer service very highly. I am one of those people that will not tip if the service in a restaurant has not been as I believe it should be. I get infuriated when left hanging by some outsourced call centre, whatever the location, or I get to talk to some disembodied voice that I can tell does not give a damn about my account. And I get even more annoyed if I think we have let a customer down. But is this going too far?
In our job we get the "privilege" of working with some of the largest names in IT and IT consultancy and it always astounds us that the level of service they provide to their customers is sometimes shockingly bad. But by dint of the fact that they are a "Big Name" they get away with it. Don't get me wrong, we make mistakes occasionally as we are human, but we always have an in depth enquiry afterwards to try to ensure it does not happen again. But these larger organisations don't seem to have the same fear of poor customer service that we do. I can tell you absolute horror stories of call centres and voice-mail systems.
If their server goes down they get round to fixing it, in time. They then tell everybody else to rush to resend the messages they didn't receive or lost. The other day I was called to a meeting by a customer. The meeting was to explain what we were doing about all the server outages that we have experienced in the last two weeks, not our outages but the big expensive consultancy firms outages. This big consultancy firm was offering no explanation or apology, just a warning that our customers messages were delayed and they should stop this happening. But it was the big consultancy firms servers that were the problem!!! They should know how to stop the problem, fix your damn servers. But we are the ones being asked what we are doing to stop the outages. Go figure.
But I still think that you cannot provide customer service that is too good. Yes I try to ensure we over specify servers and back-ups and comms. But I still fret that we have not got enough, that we might let a customer down. We try to ensure we won't, put systems in to try to prevent it, but I still worry.
And I am glad I do, and we do as a company, because I would like to think that if I was a customer I would be happy to, metaphorically, pay that 20% gratuity for good service. Because I would like to think that our customers are treated as I would like to be treated. It cannot be wrong to strive to be the best, to try to do the best for someone paying you to do a job.
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2 comments:
I don't believe in "customer service". I am not sure it exists.
You see people only start talking about "customer service" after things have gone wrong. Too late.
There is good quality products and services, delivered on time at a reasonable price. If that happens there is no need for "customer service".
If it doesn't happen, all the "customer service" in the world can't hide the fact it is trying to lessen the impact of not getting it right first time.
Hi Eddy,
Interesting point but whilst I agree about the need for good quality products and services delivered on time and at a reasonable price, you have to back this up with the best customer service.
Good customer service is there to help our customers and their trading partners. For example yesterday we were able to inform a trading partner that their server was down within a few minutes of it happening. This helped them rectify their problem faster.
Today we have received a request to change a mapping that has been running for over a year because the business requirement has changed. We have implemented the change and will be testing in the morning.
The above are just a few examples of the type of customer service we aspire to. It is not really about the straight technical implementation of an EDI integration but about the business process that EDI facilitates.
For the example originally posted you are absolutely correct, the large consultancy organisation that implemented the service that failed have a problem with server/process. The failure itself is not the problem as at some point most systems have a failure, it is the reaction to the failure that is the real issue. That is bad customer service.
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