What About Customer Service?
“The key to this job is personal relationships.” Dicky Fox, as played by Jared Jussim, Jerry Maguire
I think about customer service all the time. Probably more than is healthy but I can’t help myself. Like many people, my first jobs were in customer service. Specifically, I worked at a convenience store, then a gas station, and then a bagel shop. All of those jobs required external customer service which is defined as an employee working in direct contact with a customer who is not employed at the same company. This type of customer service is critical to the success of any business.
And I believe that in an ever-evolving market, it’s a defining factor that can set your company apart, even more so than having the best product. If you have a pretty good product and great customer service, people will keep coming back. Obviously if you have a great product and great customer service, people will be even more likely to become lifelong customers.
When times get tough and competition gets tight, there are two things that in my opinion you absolutely cannot skimp on. First and foremost is of course taking care of your employees. Because happy employees will provide better customer service every single time. Unhappy employees are far more likely to deliver a subpar experience.
Once you’ve ensured you have taken care of your employees, you can then focus on taking care of your customers. Sometimes, taking care of your customers can cost your business extra money but I promise you, that money is still likely less than the cost to obtain new customers to replace the ones that you are losing due to bad service.
The whole impetus for writing this article came about because of two customer service experiences that I had recently. Let’s start with the bad experience.
And to be clear, it’s actually been a whole series of repeated bad experiences with the same company. The company is a mid-western grocery store chain that is very prevalent here in Kalamazoo, where I live. When you go to one of these stores, it doesn’t matter the time of day, or the day of the week, you are all but guaranteed that you will be waiting in a line at the checkout that is several people deep. While the store is generally busy, the issue completely revolves around a lack of open checkout lanes. This chain of stores generally has twenty or more checkouts but rarely are more than half of those lanes open. This creates a checkout experience that can range from five to fifteen minutes.
My family has been shopping at this store for over twenty years and the checkout experience used to be fantastic, yet in the last five years especially, it’s fallen into it’s current dismal state. So why is this the case? I believe it’s due to the need to save costs and keep prices down in order to compete with larger retailers and also online grocery sales. Those online retailers are of course genuine threats to their business.
The catch 22 here is that by hurting the customer experience, they are in turn driving customers to their competitors. My family now only goes to that store for things that we have trouble finding in other stores and we generally buy a copious amounts of those products on a single trip to reduce the frequency of our trips.
In my opinion, this is the perfect example of the cutting cost in the wrong places. I believe that when you are the little fish in a lake full of behemoth fish, you need to focus on where you can excel and customer service is the easiest place to start. You’ll probably never have the cheapest prices but you can make the customers love their experience so much that they want to come back again and again.
Which leads me to the good example. In our town with have several ice cream/frozen yogurt/gelato shops. We have been to every single one of these shops more than once but there’s one that we are continually drawn back to, Via Gelato. I’ll admit that we started going to this gelato shop because of it’s proximity to our house, but their quality products and their service continue to bring us back.
Their customer service definitely has all of the basics covered. Whenever you go into the store, they are friendly, welcoming, and helpful. But that’s not what really stands out. Instead, it’s that they really pay attention to what their customers like and by that I don’t just mean that, in general, they know what type of gelato sells best. I mean that when my family shows up, they offer us gelato from the back freezer because they know it’s my son’s favorite flavor. This delights him every time it happens and it really shows the level of care that they give to each individual customer.
Recently, they went even above and beyond their normal standards and it really reminded me why I love their business so much. They are currently closed for the winter season but they still accept orders for gelato cakes via their Facebook page. They had a customer order a smores cake, which for the record is one of the most delicious things you will ever taste in your entire life. The batch that they needed to make the cake was enough for three cakes. Normally, they list the extra cakes on Facebook so as not to have them go to waste. But this time, they reached out directly to me and offered to let us buy the cake, because they know it is our family’s absolute favorite cake.
They 100% would have sold that cake on Facebook when they posted it, but instead of just doing that, they did a little extra work and made a regular customer’s day. That, my friends, is how you win at customer service.
Here’s some great news. All of those positive things we just talked about for external customer service all apply to internal customer service as well. And no matter what job you hold in this world, you are providing someone either internal or external with customer service. If in your role, you perform works that supports anyone else, then they are indeed your customer.
All that’s left is for you to decide what experience you want them to have when they interact with you. I sincerely hope that you are willing to go the extra mile and help make their day because that’s not just what customer service people do— it’s what leaders do.
-Jason