To me, Customer Service is:
- What we call it when a business takes care of its customer’s problems, questions and complaints.
- The name of our product, a part of SuperOffice CRM, which helps businesses do just that.
This is how I believe this is working:
As a business you are selling a product or a service to customers. Some of these customers will return with issues ("The product is not working", "I have a problem with this invoice", "Can you tell me how to...", "Where is my ticket?"). You need to help your customers and take care of these issues; otherwise your customers will leave you (and rant about it on Twitter afterwards).
It wasn’t always so. In the pre-historic era of non-internet, businesses were hard to get in touch with, were run by the government, had monopoly, and did not care much for your problems. You should consider yourself happy if you actually got a phone subscription.
In modern life, I can Google up at least 10 different mobile phone providers in seconds, and quickly check them out. Customers who have suffered bad experiences have gladly shared them on Facebook. As a well-informed customer in a transparent market I will choose the one who won the award for best customer service. Because prices do not vary that much, and there just aren’t that many exiting things you can do with a mobile phone subscription. In other words, customer service suddenly has become one of the most important criteria when choosing my provider.
How about that? Offering service to their customers, something businesses used to consider an annoying requirement, has become one of the most important ways to compete. Because if you do take good care of your customers, they will remain loyal even if you are not the cheapest provider in town. And taking good care of them means being available when they need to get in touch with you, and handling their inquiry in a quick and professional manner.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Just wanting to take really good care of your customers will not suffice if your inbox is flooded Monday morning, and you are running out of post-its. Please choose the right tool for the task. If you want to open a bottle of wine, get a corkscrew. If you want to manage hundreds of customers inquiries, get a customer service system. Such as system will not do magic, but it will allow you and your colleagues to work efficiently and professionally when helping your customers.
