No matter where you go or where you work, everyone is always concerned about customer service. Customer service is very important and determines if a a new customer becomes a returning customer. Most of the time you think of customer service as a staff person’s interaction with a non-staff member (the public). But customer service is just as important with internal customers too. But customer service is more than just doing a task for someone.
Yes, customer service is being polite, talking well, presenting yourself well, and keeping the customer happy. But customer service is also making recommandations to your customer based on the context of their need. Afterall, you are the expert, not them - otherwise they wouldn’t need your help in the first place.
A recent experience came at the bank. The wife went to the bank to make a few deposits. She was needed some deposit slips and other things, so she went inside to make the deposit. The teller took the check and deposited it into the account. Primary task done and from the teller’s point of view she helped you as much as you asked. BUT, the teller actually had good customer service because she made some recommendations on our current account status and so on. She could have just deposited the check and sent the wife on her way, but she didn’t. She took a extra minute and gave us an option that might make our banking better.
It turns out we took her advice, but had she not said anything we would not have. That’s not to say things would have fallen apart without, they wouldn’t have - but now it’s better.
That’s good customer service.
Any monkey can tell me where the duct tape is or press buttons and give me change back. But can everyone actually help me make what I do better? That’s the deciding factor between good customer service and just customer service.
Some of my roles at work have recently been “reprioritized” and I’m not playing a more typical developer role - that is, I just make things go - instead of making things go on top of making things work well for people, which is what I was doing.
In a new weekly meeting, I get a list of things people want done to the company web site. Just a straight up list. I look at the list and question some of the things on the list. I question if they should be done, the advantages to doing them, the disadvantages, the work involved, and most importantly, will it make an impact on the visitors to the web site. I was making some verbal comments but was hushed, told to stifle my comments.
This is not good customer service.
As the person doing the servicing, I am thus in the expert role - they are coming to me. So it should only be right that I make suggestions in order to make things better. Afterall, that’s good customer service (on top of thinking about the public). But I’ve been told, basically, to just do what they say.
Now, this isn’t an authoritative problem. I don’t mind just doing so long as that doing makes sense. This is a respect problem. I know web sites well and I study about how people use web sites and what benefits them most - keeping them happy and coming back. But I am not able to help where I can help best.
Good customer service is not hard to achieve. You just need to be confident in what you know well and be able to speak up (nicely) when you are involved. You owe it to yourself (and also your employer) to make the most out of your knowledge.
