Forum - Advice required with regards to Customer Service

Agree with all that's been said here. No company will get it 100% right first time but the best ones empower their staff to identify areas of improvement and to implement solutions without having to ask upstairs for permission, and to then feed the results back to the rest of the company.

It's incredibly rewarding and refreshing when you do raise an issue with a regular staff member and they both resolve it and proactively ensure that it won't happen again.

It's so frustrating when so many companies have the "computer says no" attitude. Imagine if all staff acted like an "Executive Resolutions" team. Why are such things necessary in the first place? They are a company's solution to the bad service given by their system of call centres, scripts and compartmentalised staff roles. Who do you complain to if Executive Resolutions screw it up?

Once upon a time a letter to the Chief Executive of a company would yield swift, decisive action and you were left with the impression that someone would get a good shouting-at for messing up in the first place. Today we've got a fluffy, all-inclusive society where now every opinion, emotion and action can be justified or explained by sociologists. We've ended up with consultation processes that are more interested in gaining acceptance of a pre-agreed idea, than they are about consultation.

Games are played with statistics instead of simply aiming to be definitively good. For great customer service, staff need to know that they are aiming for great customer service and to enjoy giving it. A mechanism that is designed to systemise "customer service" is useless for that purpose if those involved in designing it, implementing it and using it don't understand
that it's all about the service and not the system.

Example - London Underground has staff with radios in blue suits and caps. They're called "customer service" apparently. Some of them are very helpful, whilst others, as recent news has shown http://bit.ly/ZqICA can be incredibly unhelpful and rude. If the video had not surfaced of this incident, would he still have a job?

A company should be thinking "how would everything we do look on YouTube?" but this doesn't work in every case. There's a television programme about a certain airline that I would hate travel with after seeing how they are trained to treat their customers with the cameras rolling, but for them I suppose it's great advertising. They're targeting people who care more about price than about service and at least the TV show has served to educate me that I shouldn't expect great service with this cheap airline.

John Lewis is a very popular chain because of its customer service and much of this is down to the partnership owner structure which essentially means all staff members are management and shareholders. As you investigate different companies, try to notice which ones "live" customer service and which ones only pay lip-service to it. I'll bet that much of the difference between the two can be put down to the level of understanding of and involvement in the company's strategy and implementation.

As copymojo says, look for companies that have put thought into the layout of the store and the entire customer experience. The ones which pack aisles too close together are gambling that customers will return based on price rather than because of their experience.