The Fastest and Easiest Way to Improve Your Customer Service

“I became a policeman because I wanted to be in a business where the customer is always wrong.” – Author Unknown

This just came to me tonight. It’s very simple. Tell your customer service people that their primary job is NOT to process each phone call within a certain number of minutes, or to convey information, or to solve problems — though those things certainly need to be done. Tell them that their job is to get each customer to say, “Boy, you are great!” or “Hey, this is really great customer service.”

In other words, tell them that they have to do such a good job that they get — from every possible caller, no matter how disgruntled he is at the start — verbal praise for how they handled his problem.

Make it clear that this is their top priority. That they will have to do whatever it takes to please the customer so immensely that he won’t be able to resist remarking on how good the customer service is.

You’ll have to give them some additional authority to give the customer satisfaction in terms of gifts, discounts, extended service, etc. And you’ll have to come up with a list of low-cost, high-value items with suggestions on how many they can give out.

You will also have to do a lot of brainstorming about other creative ways to make your customers happy. (Spending time and energy on your customers. That’s what good customer service is.)

Your customer service reps should understand that their goal is to elicit specific, verbal gratitude from even the most unhappy customers — and should be warned that this may take a lot of effort. But in learning to please the perpetual whiners, they’ll be honing their pleasing skills for the rest of your customer base. In the larger scheme of things, they will improve themselves and enhance the reputation of your business.

Tell them that you will monitor their calls occasionally (and make sure you do it). Ask them to keep track of their own successes and report them to you.