Customer Service Is the Business

Most business owners believe they provide good customer service. Very few wake up in the morning and decide they are going to frustrate customers, ignore problems, or make doing business unnecessarily difficult. Yet we have all dealt with companies that somehow manage to accomplish exactly that.

The interesting thing is that bad customer service usually isn’t caused by bad people. More often, it develops because nobody has stopped to define what good customer service is supposed to look like.

As a business grows, habits become procedures, shortcuts become normal, and employees begin making their own decisions about how customers should be treated. Eventually, the customer experience becomes whatever happens that day.

That makes customer service a Business Foundations issue.

It isn’t something you worry about after you’ve perfected your product, hired enough employees, built your website, and figured out your marketing. Customer service is part of the business you’re building from the very beginning.

Your Customer Doesn’t See Departments

Inside your business, you probably see different responsibilities.

Sales handles sales. Accounting handles billing. Operations fulfills orders. Customer service deals with complaints. Management makes decisions.

Your customer doesn’t care.

To the customer, all of those people are simply your company.

If the salesperson is wonderful but accounting is impossible to work with, the customer doesn’t say, “Accounting provided a poor experience, but sales was excellent.”

They say, “That company is difficult to work with.”

This is why customer service cannot belong exclusively to the person answering the telephone or responding to email. Every employee who interacts with a customer contributes to the customer’s opinion of the business.

Sometimes employees who rarely speak directly with customers contribute to that experience too. The person packing an order, preparing an invoice, scheduling an appointment, maintaining equipment, or updating information in your computer system can all make a customer’s experience better or worse.

Customer service is the combined result of all those little interactions.

Good Customer Service Doesn’t Mean Always Saying Yes

One of the biggest misconceptions about customer service is that keeping customers happy means giving them whatever they want.

It doesn’t.

Sometimes the answer needs to be no.

A customer may ask for something outside the scope of the agreement. They may want an impossible deadline, demand a refund that isn’t justified, expect an employee to ignore company policy, or behave disrespectfully toward your staff.

Good customer service doesn’t require surrendering good business judgment.

It does require communicating clearly and respectfully.

There is a tremendous difference between saying, “No, we don’t do that,” and taking a few moments to explain what you can do instead.

Customers can usually accept reasonable boundaries when those boundaries are communicated consistently. What frustrates people is uncertainty, indifference, defensiveness, or discovering that the rules seem to change depending on whom they talk to.

Good service isn’t about saying yes to everything. It’s about helping customers understand what happens next.

Speed Matters, Even When You Don’t Have the Answer

Imagine you send an email to a company about a problem and hear nothing for three days.

What happens during those three days?

You start wondering whether anyone received your message. Then you wonder whether anyone cares. Eventually, irritation begins replacing patience.

The company may actually be working diligently on your problem, but you don’t know that.

Silence creates its own story.

That is why responsiveness is such an important part of customer service. You don’t always need to have an immediate solution. Sometimes simply acknowledging the customer can dramatically improve the experience.

“We received your message. I don’t have an answer yet, but I’m looking into it and will get back to you tomorrow afternoon.”

That takes very little effort, but it tells the customer three important things: someone is listening, someone has taken responsibility, and there is a reasonable expectation about what happens next.

Then, of course, you have to get back to them tomorrow afternoon.

Problems Are Opportunities to Build Trust

Every business eventually makes mistakes.

An order gets shipped incorrectly. An appointment gets missed. An employee misunderstands instructions. A bill contains an error. Something breaks. A promised deadline slips.

You can spend enormous amounts of energy trying to create a business where nothing ever goes wrong, but you will probably fail.

People make mistakes. Equipment fails. Vendors disappoint us. Computers crash. Weather happens. Miscommunication occurs.

The more useful question is: What does your business do when something goes wrong?

That moment may tell customers more about your company than an entire year of transactions that went perfectly.

When everything works, the customer doesn’t need much from you. When something fails, they discover what kind of company they’re actually dealing with.

Do you listen?

Do you become defensive?

Do you blame someone else?

Do you make excuses?

Or do you acknowledge the problem, take responsibility for what you can control, explain what you’re going to do, and then follow through?

A well-handled problem can actually strengthen a business relationship because the customer learns something valuable: when things go wrong, you show up.

Make It Easy to Do Business With You

There is a simple customer-service exercise every business owner should occasionally perform.

Pretend you’ve never done business with your company before.

Visit your website. Try to find your telephone number. Send an inquiry. Request a quote. Schedule an appointment. Ask a question. Buy something. Read an invoice. Try to understand your return policy.

Then pay attention to every place where you have to stop and think.

Customers encounter friction that business owners no longer notice because we already understand our own systems.

We know which extension to dial. We know where the form is located. We know what an abbreviation on the invoice means. We know which employee handles a particular problem.

The customer doesn’t.

Sometimes improving customer service has nothing to do with teaching employees to smile more. It means fixing systems that unnecessarily frustrate people.

Great customer service often feels remarkably simple because someone behind the scenes worked very hard to make it that way.

Give Employees Enough Authority to Help

We’ve probably all experienced some version of this conversation:

“I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”

“Can I speak with someone who can?”

“My manager isn’t available.”

“When will the manager be available?”

“I’m not sure.”

Now a relatively small problem has become a very large customer-service problem.

Employees need boundaries, but they also need enough authority to solve reasonable problems.

If every $10 decision requires the approval of someone earning $100 an hour, you’ve created an expensive bottleneck while simultaneously frustrating your customers.

Think about the common problems your employees encounter and decide in advance what they are authorized to do.

Can they replace a damaged item?

Can they waive a small fee?

Can they offer a discount when the company has clearly made a mistake?

Can they reschedule something without management approval?

Can they spend $25, $50, or $100 to solve a legitimate customer problem?

The appropriate answers will be different for every business. What matters is that employees understand where their authority begins and ends.

That allows them to confidently say, “I can help you with that.”

Those may be five of the most valuable words in customer service.

Listen to Complaints Differently

Nobody enjoys receiving complaints, particularly when you’ve worked hard to build your business.

It is easy to become defensive because criticism can feel personal.

But complaints contain information.

One complaint may simply be one unhappy customer. Five complaints about the same issue deserve your attention. Twenty customers struggling with the same process probably means you have a business problem.

The dangerous customers aren’t always the ones who complain. Sometimes they’re the ones who quietly leave.

They don’t call.

They don’t send an angry email.

They don’t ask for the manager.

They simply decide not to come back.

Then they tell someone else why.

A customer who takes the time to explain what went wrong may actually be giving you an opportunity to fix something before you lose more customers.

You don’t have to agree with every complaint. You should, however, be curious enough to ask whether there is something useful hiding inside it.

Customer Service Is What People Remember

Customers may forget exactly what they paid. They may forget the name of the employee who helped them. They may even forget some of the details of what they purchased.

But people have surprisingly long memories about how businesses made them feel.

They remember the company that stayed ten minutes late to help them.

They remember the employee who returned a call when nobody else would.

They remember the business owner who admitted a mistake instead of making excuses.

Unfortunately, they also remember being ignored, dismissed, transferred five times, talked down to, or treated as though their problem was an inconvenience.

Those experiences become stories.

And customers tell stories.

That is why customer service eventually becomes marketing. A great experience creates recommendations, reviews, repeat customers, and referrals. A poor experience can undo thousands of dollars in advertising.

You can tell the world you’re a great company, but eventually your customers will decide whether that’s true.

Key Takeaways

Customer service isn’t simply how you handle complaints. It is the complete experience of doing business with your company.

Make it easy for customers to reach you and understand what happens next. Respond quickly, even when you don’t have an immediate answer. Give employees enough authority to solve reasonable problems. Pay attention to recurring complaints, and look for unnecessary friction in your systems.

Most importantly, remember that customers don’t experience your policies, departments, job descriptions, and procedures separately.

They experience your business.

Build a company that is easy to trust, easy to communicate with, and easy to do business with, and great customer service becomes much more than a courtesy.

It becomes a competitive advantage.

Keep Asking. Keep Learning.

Take a few minutes this week and experience your business from your customer’s perspective. Call your own telephone number. Visit your website. Submit an inquiry. Read your invoices. Review your policies. Ask your employees what customer problems they encounter most often.

Then ask one simple question:

What could we make easier for our customers?

Small improvements made consistently can completely change how people experience your business.

Always Seek Knowledge exists to help small business owners ask better questions, learn from experience, and build stronger businesses. Explore more practical business guidance, download our free resources, and sign up for the ASK newsletter at www.AlwaysSeekKnowledge.org.

Keep Asking. Keep Learning.