I’m a customer, you’re a customer, and we all are customers. At some point in our lives we all will have the pleasure of being a customer and dealing with customer service. Customer service is defined as one who aides or provides help to a purchaser of a good or service. Ultimately the industry is run by consumers and you can gain valuable information from them. A business can succeed or fail based on its consumers and without customer service, you may not ever find a way to not only better satisfy them but also create a more prosperous business.
I believe customer service is much more than just “service” provided to a consumer. It is not just a part of how you serve people but how you represent the company you work for and yourself. Fail at either and a successful business will be difficult to maintain.
Customer service can mean so many things; it is what sets you apart from being a good business with good service, to an excelling business with excellent service. As an individual, you make it be “just a job” or turn it around to be an outstanding employee with public relations skills.
I feel an important aspect of customer service is to know your customer, know what they want, know who they are, and knowing how to exceed their expectations. The first steps, when a customer first visits you, are building a relationship with that individual person. Get to know who they are, kind of like finding out what makes a clock tick. This is the first building block to the foundation of rapport. Develop a trust between you and your customers will give you a loyal returning customer.
Treat your customers as individuals and as you would want to be treated. There’s nothing like having issues with a product and having to deal with the company, but to be treated poorly while doing so just adds fuel to the fire. If you wouldn’t want to be treated in an ill manner, do not treat them in that way either. You will only suffer consequences for the outcome.
This leads into the fact that word of mouth is important. Customers are going to talk, good or bad. Bad news tends to travel faster and gets misconstrued further, just like wildfire. It is harder to build relations with bad news lingering than it would be had the problem been taken care of properly in the beginning.
Be a good listener, value your customers and be sincere about it. Your customer can tell if you are being genuine or not. Body language, tone of your voice, to the look on your face, could give it all away. If you are not being sincere or providing the individualized attention that your customer is asking for, you could possibly lose a lifetime potential to who knows what! You never know when that “secret shopper” or the local news may end up on your doorstep interviewing you to splash your dirty laundry all over the front page. Of course, this shouldn’t be the reason why you provide excellent service but just a forethought to what could be around the corner.
After all else fails and it just seems you can’t make things right, realize the power of an apology. Apologizing and agreeing with the customer is sometimes all that they want to hear. Maybe you are really not the person at fault, but so what? To them it doesn’t matter, you’re in the crosshairs and the point of contact at that moment. It may take a simple apology or at times something extra on top of that apology to make things right. Other times, it just the fact you are the person to come complain to, well… just because they can! No matter how annoying it can be, or how bad it can make you feel, at some point you have to realize not to take it personally as much as possible and just make it right.
As a developer/designer customer service is provided by you, having a one on one personal interaction with your customers is the key. The more knowledge you gain from the customer allows you to provide the very best in experience and stand out website. Customer service is important in the web industry, without it your business wouldn’t thrive and neither would the web.
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