Customers are inherently inefficient and inconvenient to do business with, writes Customer Service Consultant Micah Solomon, in a recent Forbes post. That’s why he believes great customer service depends on understanding this fact and figuring out how to build a customer experience that accommodates it.
We recently asked Matt Shaw, Design & Project Management at Doud BTS, Inc. in Colorado, to share his customer service perspectives in an Insight Warehouse Tip on the Starbuildings blog. In a brief video, Shaw talks about the importance of keeping the lines of communications open with his clients, especially when facing a missed deadline.
Solomon believes you can only provide a great customer experience if you adjust your scheduling, staffing and resources to match the schedule and wishes of customers.
“You can’t give great customer service if you do it only on your own schedule, and only in ways that improve your own efficiency and help you hit your internal benchmarks, while ignoring those of your customer,” he writes.
That means anticipating clients’ needs ahead of time, because “just in time” can be too late.
“The one thing that Lean methodology and customer service excellence agree on most clearly is this: Value is determined by your customers,” Solomon writes. “If it takes a thousand ‘’inefficient’’ experiences to create loyal customers with confidence in us, so be it.”
While that meticulous attention to customer needs can be challenging, satisfied customers value their business partners and are loyal to them.
“In service-focused businesses, our customers don’t tend to quantify the source of their happiness with precision,” he writes. “Instead, they come away from our efforts to serve them with a generalized glow, a vague feeling that they like us and want to return, and (we hope) a desire to tell their friends about us.”
Read more from the Starbuildings blog.
Editor's note: This is sponsored content. The text was provided by the sponsor company.
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