The Whys of Customer Service

In the current competitive environment, customer service can be the determining factor in whether someone decides to do business with you or with your competitor. Accordingly, the primary concern of your organization must be providing exceptional service every time you come into contact with a client or potential client—every phone call, meeting, civic or social event. The fact of business life today is that consumers expect to be treated properly and to have their questions answered. If you and your organization don’t offer these things in customer service, your competitors will.

To deliver great customer service, you must evaluate your organization to identify problem areas in your customer experience and then structure the organization so management and staff are working together toward the same goal, 100-percent great customer service.

For example, in your evaluation you find that customers are complaining because they’re on hold too long before talking with a live person. So what the next step?

A typical response is to assume the problem is with a single person or department. However, great customer service organizations try to fix the problem, not a symptom of the problem. The fact that customers are on hold too long is a symptom. Identifying true cause of a problem is the important step.

Asking Why?
Once you have identified a problem (such as customer’s on hold too long) is when the process truly begins. The next step is to ask why?  Asking why helps to distill the problem from symptom to root cause. The why process is simple – once you know have identified a problem, ask the question why? This will give you an answer. Then ask why again and again until you get to the root cause

Here’s an example of how to use the why process:

Problem:  Clients are on hold too long.

Why?
Answer: We have a new popular product and are receiving more calls, and each call is taking longer because we have to explain the product to the client.

Why?
Answer: The promotional material we mailed to our clients didn’t explain the product in much detail. The mailer mentioned the name of the product and promised the client some pretty amazing returns but didn't give much detail about the product.

Why?

Answer: We wanted to save money by printing only on one side of the sheet.

So you have identified a root cause and now you can identify some solutions that will be a true, perhaps less expensive solution For example in this instance you could send out another more detailed piece, have a pre-recorded message explaining the product in detail, send out an e-mail to the original targeted audience or other solutions. 

This is a systematic approach to problems that your competition, if they are not already using this method, are either throwing dollars at or are going to lose customers to you. One thing to keep in mind is that customer service investments can offer the greatest return on your marketing dollars. The referrals that can result from great customer service can bring in customers that cost you nothing to generate.