Customer service: should you blow your own trumpet?

With the increasing emphasis on customer service, more and more companies claim that they offer a very good service, the very best service even. But is it wise to blow your own trumpet? Any service delivery hick-up could then lead to a severe back clash, with many customers using the high quality service expectations set by the company as an excuse for complaining, mocking the company and thereby damaging its reputation. An alternative course is to let the customers do the talking and use forums, social media platforms and the many other tools available to ensure that the positive feedback is noticed by many. So next time you are thinking about blowing your own trumpet, make sure you can last the distance.

Will your customer service leave a long lasting impression?

Giving a good impression is the ambition of many companies and it is fair to say that with the investment in technology, social media and training much progress is being achieved across the board. The basis for competition has shifted though and with no immediate prospect of a sustained improvement in the economic environment, customer service's importance keeps growing. At the end of the day it is no longer enough to assess if your service performance was good enough. The key measure will be to what extent your customer service has left a long lasting impression and as a result existing customers will become promoters of your products and services

Customer service rainmaker

Should you want it or not, your company customer service performance is very likely to be a key determinant of its future success. Customer service as a rainmaker? Its impact can not be underestimated but should conditions deteriorate and bring a little rain, make sure that all your customer service efforts bring a little ray of sunshine to spectacular effect.

Customer service is in the eye of the beholder

Beauty has long been recognised to be in the eye of the beholder. Could the same be said about customer service? The ideal customer service standards have been established for many different services across all sectors but do we give customers enough choice? Do they have the ability to put emphasis on certain element of the service and totally ignore others. Technological developments enable more and more refined analysis of customers, encouraging them at best and, directing them in the worst cases, towards purchases that they did not want to make in the first place. Could a totally reverse approached be engineered, the blank canvass. Or will it prove too difficult for customers to decide what they want? After all, the canon of beauty is often determined by the media so why shouldn't the canon of customer service be determined by business executives?

Fishy customer service

What is the link between a fish and customer service? 

Better hope that there are none. Unless you operate in the fish industry, it is better to avoid fishy customer service practices. There are no clear universal pointers as to what 'fishy' means but it could include known sub-standard operations, unfair practices, insufficient documentation, misleading advertising and many more horrible items that we can not quote in a blog dedicated to good customer service. Next time you review your customer service, someone should explicitly be tasked with the  objective to ensure that there is nothing fishy going on.

Customer service guide

Customer service guide: 

When designing a new customer service guide, executives could usefully draw parallels between customers finding their way in the market place and sailors navigating across unknown waters.  More often than not, difficulties can be avoided by learning from the experience of others who have just followed the same path. The key to success is to capture that experience and make judicious use of all modern technologies and tools to guide customers through the buying process. Sailors made good use of lighthouses and hand-drawn maps, what customer service guide and tools are you making available to your customers?