it just opened up a plethora of businesses only too eager to cater to
those customers. A great book on Customer Service is Carl Sewell's
"How to Win Customers and Keep Them For Life"; it should be required
reading for everyone involved in customer service and all the upper
levels of every corporation.
Thick skinned people are a rarity, one in fifty to 1 in 100. Those
thick skinned people make great salespeople, but a poor example of the
average customer. Those other 49 out of 50 people will make, or break
those businesses that succeed at respecting or fail to respect their
customers.
Even if no one ever noticed a companies negative traits, the employees
do. You have heard of "trickle-down economics"? Well I believe in
"trickle-down attitudes", most companies are perfect reflections of
the people that run them. Some upper managers would not be caught dead
among their subordinates, I believe that elitist view will commit that
company to a quick demise.
You probably would like examples to help prove all of this but I aint
getting paid so maybe a Googlian can do that for you.
On the "opposite" side of the coin I believe the barriers to service
quality are many. For instance a well written salesletter (web page)
will open customers wallets, but only the most enraged customers will
return the merchandise or ask for a refund. The vast majority will
just make a note "not to shop there" again. Nothing learned by that
company, and for awhile those internet companies will succeed because
of the "sheer" numbers of customers made available through the web.
Others seeing the "easy profits" made by these companies will be
copycats which is perfectly fine, but service quality will suffer.
One thing is for certain though, this is an "Information Age" and
customers are constantly learning. What are they going to learn about
service quality from your company?
A really great company wont even need to have a "customer service"
department because every person that answers the phone will be in
"that department". Each employee will only be too eager to put out the
match" before it turns into a "forest fire". |
