Special Report
The science of service
Happy customers are a product of well-trained and happy employees
By Jessica Tremayne
Smart Business Columbus | March 2009
Page 1 of 3
If you’re looking at your budget and considering cutting back
on support for customer service, you might want to reconsider. About 96 percent of unhappy customers don’t take the initiative to tell you they’re unhappy with your service, but they
will tell nine other people and not return.
Customer service should be as important to you as it is to
your customer, and customer service is second in importance
only to product quality when it comes to satisfying customers.
The difference in today’s market is that brand loyalty isn’t
what it used to be. Businesses are making a new promise every
day without credible reasons for the consumer to believe the
promise. Customers make purchases because they believe
you’re selling something they need, but they also know they
have many options. A single bad experience with you can
result in your customers making purchases from the guy down
the street next week. The products may be similar, but the
quality of your customer service can be why they prefer to
make purchases with you.
“Customer service should be one of the top priorities for any
company,” says Jim Ruppel, vice president of customer relations and Rapid Rewards at Southwest Airlines. “People
always want to know that the service or product they received
was a good value for the money spent. Customer service can
be that differentiator between feeling you got what you paid
for and feeling like you got a great value for what you paid.”
If customers have a good experience with your business,
they’re more likely to return and spend money again. Positive
word-of-mouth is one of the cheapest and most effective means
of growing your business. It’s also much less expensive to retain
a customer you already have than to attract new ones.
Customer service in today’s market entails doing business
where and when your customers want to. The trick is to cut
costs while being flexible with your ways of improving customer service quality across all avenues, including online and
by phone.
There’s an easy formula for this, yet it’s not utilized. It starts
with paying better wages. Then you have to invest in your
employees’ ability to perform through education and train
them to respond to customer needs.
