Friday, August 19, 2011

Considerable Customer Service


What comes to mind when you think of the phrase “customer service”?  Most people may envision a smiling person who assists you with your purchase or transaction.  This smiling person was knowledgeable, polite, and competent in providing you with your needs.  This assessment is correct; however, there is a lot more to customer service than assisting a customer with just one transaction. 

Customer service is the embodiment of the interactions that occur between the customer and the provider.  Customer service is something that should never go away, even after the project is completed. Great customer service is the reason why your customer will continue to do business with you and will have no qualms referring additional business in your direction. 

Recently my company provided a bid response for a large opportunity.  One of the requirements to be included in our submittal was client references of projects that were similar to the opportunity we were vying for.  This is not a rare occurrence, as we often provide references of similar projects to help showcase our capabilities.  After we provided our submission, my coworker and I were talking about this opportunity (we both contributed to our bid response).  My coworker said to me “I really hope that our references are happy with us”.  We went on to discuss that we know these customers are happy with us, at least they tell us they are, as otherwise we would not have used them for a reference.  We went on to discuss how a customer could be perfectly happy with the sales representative, but not be so comfortable with the installation staff (or vice versa).   We concluded the conversation agreeing that customer service is fluid and needs to continually happen with the customer and that it needs to flow from all positions within the company. 

You never really know if a customer is fully happy with you until they are asked from another source.  That is when the most honest reviews will surface about your workmanship and competency.  What you can do to help make sure a customer is happy is take the time to talk to them.  Confirm they are happy with what they have purchased or received.  Confirm the overall feeling that they received from your company is positive.  You want the customer to feel like you were their champion during the project and that you were looking out for their best interests in providing the best solution for their needs (which you should be doing anyway).  There is nothing worse than having a good customer receive bad service because you were rushing to complete the job, or you were having a bad day and leaked it out to the customer (whether they were the reason for your bad day or not).  There have been surprise instances (luckily not that many) where a customer who you thought was going to give you a glowing recommendation was actually not happy with your performance. 

Continue to follow up with your customers; show them that you care.  While there are a few customers who never seem to be happy, most customers will continue to do business with you if you provide the extra effort to show them they are important to you.

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