Are Your Customer Service Guidelines Fair?

Are your customer service guidelines fair?  Should your next question be fair to who? Are your customer service guidelines fair to your business but not to your customers? Are your customer service guidelines too Fair?

Answering these questions are very important. One thing is for sure your customers need to think that your customer service is in their favor. I know that many business have horror stories of customers that seemed to try to take advantage of returns or exchanges.

I spoke with a person who had a hard time getting a refund on a layaway plan when the store no longer offered or simply couldn't fill the item she had on layaway. They felt that the customer needed to accept store credit and select another item.  Was that a fair solution? Or should they have given the customer a full refund and an apology. With the cash back she would have been free to try and find the item she wanted at a different store. Yes, the first store would have lost a sale but, perhaps retained the customer’s good will.

Perhaps the basic question here is why they could not fill the original layaway transaction. Were they selling the stock on hand and expecting to fill the layaways with future orders. That could have been the underlying error. While this wasn’t a holiday purchase it could be a real problem trying to fulfill a last minute gift with a Christmas sales crush.

In this case the customer had to rely on her credit card to force the refund issue. So perhaps the store had forever lost that customer. How valuable are your customers? Do you try and calculate the cost of acquiring a new customer? What does the loss of a customer cost you.

I know a grocery store that threw away a $800 dollar a month customer over a poorly written ad and a difference of 9 cents a pound.  Was it the nine cents… no it was the attitude and the way the store manager treated the customer while saying no.  Are your customer service guidelines fair?  

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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600 West Ray Road
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Chandler Arizona 85225
602-235-0975
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