To be able to offer superior customer service, we have to be able to define the monster. Once we understand what customer service is, we are in a far better position to spoil, pamper, delight and satisfy our customers here at Rivoni skills.
Customer service is all about expectations. When you and your customer get face to face, or phone to phone, or impact in any other way, the customer has expectations about the encounter. How you measure up, relative to those expectations, will determine whether your service is perceived as good or bad.
Note that I said “perceived”. It is not what you think that counts here, but rather what the customer thinks. I often hear people say that they really did their best with a particular customer, yet the customer is still unhappy. It’s not your best that determines customer satisfaction, but rather what the customer thinks they got, against what they expected to get.
The expectations
If customer service is all about expectations, what do customers really want?
*Now that’s a Question for you reading this. Try defining what you expect when you are at particular business encounters*
•My expectation: I expect a product or service to measure up to my demands. If I buy a kettle, I expect it to boil water. I don’t expect it to play music, but I certainly will expect it to boil water.
•Some customers expect to be treated like persons of value...every time. A customer is not a number. A customer is not a line on a computer printout. A customer is a real live person with real feelings, pride, and dignity, and deserves to be treated as a person of value.
It really happened to me
I was standing at the service counter of a large discounter store, when a woman brought in a toaster she had bought brand new the day before. Now the first problem we have here at South Africa is total lack of customer sensitivity regarding electrical appliances. Think about it for a minute. The vast majority of electrical products are sold in a usable condition_ until recently. They had no plug fitted, “but that’s no big deal”, you may say. To some people it is. Some people do not have the technical expertise to fit the plug, which means that they have to get someone else to do it for them. (But that’s not the point of the story)
The woman gave her cash slip to the assistant, and explained that the toaster just did not work. ‘What did you do to bugger it up?’ was the challenge that she was presented with. In a nice quiet submissive way she tried to explain that all she had done was to put on the plug. “Then you did it was wrong and messed up the appliance, “was the response. (Are you feeling angry reading this? I was watching it)
