Customer Service Weak?

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: Good Enough Ain’t Good Enough

Competency: customer service

Who benefits: any employee or future employee

Consultant Usage: these articles might be useful background for customer service trainers

What’s it about?  I think I shall make this my own Customer Service Week.  I dedicate this week to all of you who have experienced poor customer service in your already complicated enough lives. 

Customer service can be viewed as a competency.  We treat it as a competency here at Envisia Learning.  Enlightened companies use our tools to measure the effectiveness of their customer service employees (drat, that reads like a commercial … it’s not.  The important point is measurement.) 

And employee effectiveness is only part of the equation.  Customer service systems … or lack thereof … may be an even bigger problem.  As an example, I love my Direct TV product, but I would only give a “C” to customer services representative effectiveness and a big fat “F” to their customer service systems.  That’s my war story.  What’s yours?

I just came across a short and interesting article by business owner and writer Michael Hess called ‘Good Enough’ Customer Service Is NOT Good Enough.  His article is very passionate and doesn’t rely on metrics … which might not sit well with my data driven colleagues … but that is okay, customer service is driven by feelings.  He is borderline angry.  Me too.

There is nothing particularly new in the article.  It is just a fervent reminder of the importance of good customer service no matter which end of the service you are on.

If you like what you read, he posted a companion article sometime back that is equally interesting called Does Your Service Suck? Do Business with Yourself and Find Out.

I must confess to a mighty chuckle when he described: The “google suck-test.” Go to a search engine and enter “[your company name] sucks.”  I decided to test it with “Direct TV sucks” … I got 589,000 hits, many on YouTube.  Ah, good to know I am not alone.

 We will continue this discussion on TGIF this Friday.

Catch you later.

[tags]customer service, exceeds expectations, google suck test, do business with yourself, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.