Providing Good Customer Service Should Be Easy
July 1, 2010We have all experienced poor customer service. Not every company is as customer-centric as Zappos, but perhaps they should strive to be so. No one expects companies to be 100% perfect all the time, but it IS reasonable to expect wrongs to be righted in a professional manner. In theory, customer service should be easy. A customer comes to you with a complaint, you figure out what caused the problem, fix it, apologize and it’s done.
One of the biggest issues people face with customer service is that it’s not easy to reach someone. Sometimes it seems like companies go out of their way to avoid facing a customer. If you call, you usually have to go through an automated system and then wait for 20 minutes to talk to an actual person. If you email, you usually get an automated response. This isn’t always a bad thing, because sometimes they provide answers to frequent problems in these emails. If you are lucky, you can find your answer and be done with it, but if that’s not the case, there is more waiting, with no way of knowing if your problem will be solved.
People like to talk to another person to solve their problems. Even the most tech-savvy of us like to know that another person hears and cares about our problem. I think this is why many companies like Dell are using social media to resolve customer issues. It makes the customer feel like they have been helped by a friend, not a faceless corporation. Also, if a problem is solved publicly and a previously unhappy person is now happy, it creates general good will towards the company. You can’t buy that kind of PR.
This blog post offers great advice on providing good customer service. The piece of advice that stood out to me was about occasionally surprising your customers. Wheat Thins recently surprised a loyal customer who tweeted about their product with an unusually large amount of crackers. You can see the hilarious video here.