What is good customer service?

From the script of "Gosford Park":

"What gift do you think a good servant has that separates them from the others? It's the gift of anticipation. And I'm a good servant. I'm better than good. I'm the best. I'm the perfect servant. I know when they'll be hungry and the food is ready. I know when they'll be tired and the bed is turned down. I know it before they know it themselves."

This is a perfect example of how you can turn a negative into a positive. From my own experience in the past I always noticed that if you make a mistake with a customer job but correct the mistake really quickly you actually form a bond with the customer that is much stronger than if you never made the mistake in the first place. You actually gain because of the error as long as the customer isn't in really bad shape as a result of it. (Of course you would get diminishing returns if you had to correct more than a small number of mistakes in any given time period obviously.)

And the other type of people--those who want the cheapest--are generally not worth having as customers.

I agree 100% with the first, disagree slightly with the second. You can be prompt and efficient at resolving your customer's problems and providing them with a quality gateway to the organization, but you can't do this if your support staff is innundated by the constant pressure of answring phones. Things will come to a head where hearing the phone ring starts to become a genuine fear of support reps and CSR's will start avoiding calls just to catch up.

This comes from experience, having worked for an established software company that sold a great product, but had very unrealistic and unsustainable philosophies about support, not to mention a severely undersized team (four support reps and about 600 clients in four time-zones and one in the south Pacific)

Don't take this the wrong way, I am not saying you should be shirking your customers, or trying to find ways to build barriers to accessing that first line of defense. However I am saying you also shouldn't just assume that because you have support personnel, any opportunity for self-help and self-education should be on the back-burner. What I mean is, if your organization already has tools to help customers find the answer they need, that should be on the forefront, in the customer's face and easily accessible.

Then, and only then if your learning resources have failed, are too vague, or perhaps just doesn't answer the question in a way the customer can digest, that's when door number two opens up and it's time to contact the organization. And from there, I'm with you; be a shining beacon, be a smiling face and a welcoming gate keeper. You can learn a lot about your customer base as well as the quality of your documentation by following this strategy.

If you want a qualitative and effective team, don't toss them into the middle of a category 5 hurricane, trying to answer phones and create tickets at the same time. This will erode quality AND effectiveness.

Great post, otherwise!

I regularly take calls from people asking for features that we don't offer (and probably never will). They normally start out annoyed that we don't have what they want, but after I explain why we can't offer the feature, they normally understand completely and it doesn't seem to bother them at all.

Most customers don't have much perspective about your business. They know what they want, and they're not really thinking about how it might effect the overall experience. If you just say, "no, we don't have an iPhone app" they'll think you're brushing them off. Instead say, "I totally understand why you want an iPhone app, but if we made an iPhone app we'd also have to make apps for Android and Blackberry which would mean we couldn't spend nearly as much time focusing on making the core product better, which is why we have a mobile website which will work on all platforms". The customer wasn't thinking about that when they requested/demanded the feature. By explaining your reasoning, you're telling them that you really are listening to them and considering their ideas, but there are good reasons why you can't give them exactly what they want.

The best customer service I ever got was when I was buying an engagement ring (about 12 years ago, from Blue Nile's website). It took weeks to resolve, but every step of the way the rep (Sean P -- made a big enough impression that I remember his name) communicated clearly what the problem was on their end, what solution he was looking into, and how long it would take before he had an answer for me. He was also laser-focused on making sure the solution would work for me -- right style of ring, equal or better quality to what I'd ordered, in time for me to propose.

Excellent customer service consists of being dedicated to fixing the problem, making sure that your fix will work for the customer, and being so responsive and persistent in communication that they know those things.

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(this is totally unsolicited - I just genuinely like the startup and Emil has been awesome to us)

An often quoted statistic in marketing and sales is that it is 10 times more costly to acquire a new customer than to do the things necessary to retain an existing one.

it's a bit like being on hold--i'd far rather hear hold music uninterrupted for five minutes at a time than hear the robot break in every 15 seconds to reassure me that whoever i'm waiting for values my loyalty.