The Single Key To Great Customer Service

Advice on providing outstanding customer service tends to fall into two distinct categories.

One is based on folklore sayings such as "The customer is always right"; they sound good but don't give your employees much in the way of practical guidance. The other turns customer service into a series of checklists and canned responses; this sounds useful, but every customer is different and there's no way to codify all the possible responses.

The key just might be good old fashion customer / business interaction. With a well trained staff member that really knows how to listen. "You pick up the phone and can reach a real person!"

Callers get a real person on the second ring instead of an automated call-routing system. Or they emailed and got a surprisingly helpful personal reply instead of an impersonal scripted FAQ response.

And that is it. The secret to GREAT customer service. It is generally a huge plus if the person answering the phone is fluent in the language of the average caller.

Who could have guessed that despite all efforts put into features, pricing, design, partnerships, and more, clients would choose one company over another mainly because they liked their customer service?

What is your ratio of sales staff to customer service staff?

All great service comes from this feeling of generosity and abundance.

Think of all the examples of great service you've encountered: free refills of coffee; letting you use the restrooms even if you're not a customer; extra milk and sugar if you need it; a rep that spends a whole hour with you to answer ALL of your questions.

Contrast those with all the bad experiences you've had: not letting you use a restroom without making a purchase; charging an additional 50 cents for extra sauce; salespeople who don't give you a minute of their time because you don't look like big money.

All terrible service comes from a mindset of scarcity, from business owners who feel they'll go out of business if they don't fiercely guard their bottom line.

They say the reason those in poverty so often stay in poverty is that short-term thinking of desperate survival doesn't leave room to think of long-term solutions. If you really feel secure, abundant, that you have plenty to share, then this feeling of generosity will flow down into all of your interactions with customers.

So share. Be nice. Give refunds. Take a little loss. You should be able to afford it. If not you need to look at your pricing structure.

SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is a great start to creating your very own customer service legends. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

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Chandler Arizona 85225
602-235-0975
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