Customer Service Excellence - Part 1

Customer Service Excellence

This is one of the most elusive concepts in many businesses.  Lots of fancy words and Harvard-speak are used to describe service excellence.  Yet, many a company fails dismally to provide good service.

One is tempted to think that big corporations are very good at customer service excellence.  In addition, there is a belief that small enterprises do not have an ability to deliver outstanding customer service.

When asked, “What is the definition of customer service”, organizations find it hard to come up with a clear and crisp definition.  Some believe that superior products are the apex of customer service.  Others believe that the answer can be found in they way they handle customers, while still others believe that they offer superior service because they have been told that for the past forty years.

Remarkably, data about customer service excellence is mostly anecdotal.  Moreover, when hard data exists, there are many voices disputing what the hard data tells.  As an example, if the data suggests that the organization is unresponsive, a protest cry will sound and reams of anecdotal evidence will be offered as a counter argument.

Curiously, organizations hardly ever talk or think about customer service from the perspective of the customer.  Surely, the “voice of the customer” buzz-phrase is strewn around in very intelligent sounding Harvard-speaks. Nevertheless, when customers point out a service failure, not all the Harvard-speak in the world can change one, irrefutable fact:

Quality service lives in the mind of the customer.  

In other words, no matter what a company says or believes will change the mind of the customer – being it to the good, or for the worse.

At the very best, and because it lives in the mind of the customer, the concept of service excellence can be viewed as a highly elusive construct.  If, as an example, a customer experienced a bad day, the best possible service could be viewed as bad.  Conversely, when a customer experienced a good day, questionable service could be tolerated or overlooked by the customer.  There is thus a strong link between the customer’s state of mind and the way that the customer experiences service.

Not all entrepreneurs can say that they have a qualification in psychology so that they can understand the customers’ behaviours or states of mind.  In all honesty, entrepreneurs (or any other business for that matter), need not be behavioural scientists to understand the customer, or how to deliver service excellence.

A few common sense pointers exist in academic and popular literature and the entrepreneur should be aware of those pointers.

Over the next few weeks, some of these pointers will be discussed in detail.  In fact, our service excellence seminars use practical examples to illustrate these pointers.

In the next blog, we will answer the question, “What is customer service?”

This is the official blog of Skopus Business Consultants.  Visit us at www.skopus.co.za