It doesn’t matter if the customer is always right
I was taught growing up that ‘the customer is always right’. An axiom I have found to be true more often than not, but does that really matter?
Not if your business, or more importantly, your employees don’t know it, don’t believe it, or worse, aren’t empowered to enforce it.
Peter Shankman wrote a wonderful blog post recently that clearly illustrated this point.
http://shankman.com/would-you-lose-a-customer-over-seven-cents/
In Peter’s case he was right, but that didn’t matter. The woman behind the counter either didn’t know or believe that he was right, and perhaps worst of all, she may not have been empowered to make that decision.
In this new business-age of global competition and greater customer choice, what matters most is customer service. How we service our customers will differentiate us from our competitors now more than it ever has.
When you’re starting your own business and it’s just you it’s easy to hold true to your philosophy of customer service. It’s much more difficult, and much more important, when you grow and expand that your employees not only share your vision of customer service, but that you empower them to be able to do so.
Questions to think about:
Do my employees know what our business philosophy is regarding customer service?
Can my employees make unilateral decisions to enforce that philosophy?
Have I talked to my customers to make sure our customer service philosophy is meeting their needs?
Do our customers have a readily available and easy mechanism for escalating when our customer service doesn’t meet their needs?
Questions are at the heart of any change. If you need to change some aspect of your business, you need to change the questions you’re asking.
A Journey Institute Press Imprint
Storytellers
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General Non-Fiction
After her husband was given a job for a year in Italy, Andrea and the rest of their family joined him on the adventure; and what an adventure it was. Often trying to do the simplest of things, her story captures the hilarity of an American in Italy trying to navigate a country that seems as foreign as should be familiar.
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