Put the service in customer service

A recent beyond-terrible customer service experience has left me rattled.

After all, if the company in question – a well-known, national airline – could mess up this integral portion of the buyer/seller relationship, what hope do other companies have? Large, multinational corporations have entire teams that are responsible for customer service, complete with vice-presidents in corner offices dictating policy and setting standards.

But what about a small company? What about a shop?

How do small businesses, where everyone wears multiple hats, ensure that their customers have a better first-contact experience than Richard Dreyfuss did in Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

It starts with identifying what can go wrong and planning for it.

In Be Your Customer’s Hero, author and CSR guru Adam Toporek identified seven service triggers (which I find often lead to George Carlin’s infamous seven words) that are commonly the source of customer service complaints. The seven triggers are: being ignored, being abandoned, being hassled, being faced with incompetence, being shuffled, being powerless, and being disrespected.

Each of these triggers is bad on its own, but most often they come in twos and threes.

The good news, however, is that common manufacturing technology is making it easier than ever to create and maintain positive customer relationships. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software enables any employee with access to view a customer’s order and see how far along the production path it has travelled.

Information no longer exists in silos, which may be bad for internal corporate power bases, but is good for customer service.

Today’s ERP systems even play nice with other software, such as customer relationship management (CRM) technology that integrates every step from prospecting to billing.

This type of technology isn’t a panacea, though. It’s simply a means to an end. If you don’t have sound customer service fundamentals, complete with their own set of key performance indicators (KPIs), it doesn’t matter what type of technology you use.

Common customer service KPIs include customer satisfaction score (CSAT), response time, customer retention rate, and first-contact resolution. Tracking the correct metrics is the only way to truly judge the success or failure of your customer service department.

The airline, by the way, managed to pull all seven triggers out of me and four of Carlin’s words.