Where the Hardware and the Wetware Meet - Part 3

Wow – take the wind out my sails, why don’t you? I happened upon this link and since it says anything I might have said and better – I present the following in lieu of a ‘Part 3’ post. If I can’t improve upon the silence…well, you get the idea.

[[ Link – Guy Kawasaki – The Art of Customer Service ]]

What I would add to this info is, this is a collective process, customer service. In large, bloated organizations, it's easy for the TOP to hand out some chunky memo to satisfy accounting but slaughters whatever intangible asset they have in their customer relationships. Don't do that. Remember that human beings are on both ends of that line or website portal or email - make either side miserable and you suffer.

How do you quantify your customer service? In other words - do you have real numbers for how well you are doing? Do you collect them and review them regularly? I'm not just talking about taking polls, do your CSRs get to poll your customers and do you have a way to weed out the Jerks? I mentioned the Sprint thing where they fired their worst customers and the reason they knew who was good and who was bad was because they had the empirical data to back it up. Do you?

I was thinking about this - tell me how it smells to you: take this data and use it to identify your top 5 worst customers. Create a project and team to go after those 5 and 'kill them with kindness'. Sit down with them, talk about what bothers them about you and then see if you can fix it. Make a genuine attempt to satisfy these people and then, if that doesn't work, fire them. Practice the art of differentiation for both your bottom-of-the-barrel employees and your bottom-of-the-barrel customers.

In a lot of ways, your CS experience is a mirror for your corporate experience. If you have a great product and a management team that is trusted and liked, that will come through in how your company is being presented by your representatives. If your environment is dysfunctional and policies make it look like the lunatics are running the asylum, there's only so much your CSRs can do to hide that from the public. We aren't Superman...when your policies make us crazy, we do our best to soldier on and that is all we can do.

Customer Service in IT will always be with us and there is never a truly valuable IT position that does not involve dealing with a customer. All that being said, I'd like to do it well and help other people do the same. I'm not necessarily passionate about it - I just want to do it right.