Customer service is a matter of personal choice.

The kind of experience your customers have depends on the choices you make.

Companies do not set out to provide their customers with bad experiences,  but the people running these companies often make choices that result in customers having a bad experience. Senior managers, for example,  make a choice to provide no service rather than customer service (and make no mistake, self-service is no service). They have chosen to reduce the money they spend looking after you and to spend it on advertisements convincing you to spend your money with them. These people have chosen to say, in effect, to their customers, “Do it yourself, mate. We are not hiring people to do it for you.”

The issue is not confined to senior managers, of course. The same applies to front-line team members who choose to say, “I don’t know,” rather than “I’ll find out and get back to you.” Or who choose to make life easy for themselves by doing as little as possible rather than helping their customers by going the extra mile. Or who choose to be unfriendly, or even surly, rather than to act pleasantly. Or who choose to make excuses when something goes wrong rather than say, sorry. Or who choose to disrespect their customers by not saying please or thank you.

 

Customer service is a matter of personal choice.

When you touch your customers, at what Jan Carlsson called moments of truth over 30 years ago, whether your customer has a good or bad experience depends on how you behave and how you behave is based on the choices you make. You choose to look after your customer or you choose to look after yourself. You choose to go the extra mile or to do as little as possible. Whether your customer gets a good or bad experience depends on the choices you make.

What choices are you making and how do these affect your customers?