Ever wondered what the most overused phrase in retail is? I’m sure there’s quite a few that come to mind… for me, I always recall the typical local buy-here-pay-here commercials ending with “BEST CUSTOMER SERVICE IN TOWN… GUARANTEED!”
What type of a guarantee is that?
One of the first things I learned in business was that certain things should NOT be advertised or over-promoted… for example, with many high-quality restaurants, the food should speak for itself. Nothing wrong with running some advertising campaigns to boost your business… but if your food isn’t that great, all you are doing is expediting your ticket to bankruptcy!
Similar is the concept of customer service. If you need to go out of your way to tell me that you have the best customer service in town… odds are you’re probably closer to the other end of the spectrum.
“The steak sells itself….”
Customer service is led by example and starts at the top. If business owners have a low regard for how they treat their managers, managers will have a low regard for how they treat their client-facing employees. And so the story goes….
True story – I flew well over 100k miles in 2019. As you can imagine, I’m nowhere near that in 2020… but all that travel taught me plenty of things about customer service, specifically around when it is needed the most. Too many times I found myself on the bad end of someone’s frustrations that usually had nothing to do with me. I always came back to the same question in my head… “Who is paying to be here, and who is being paid to be here?”. Now obviously this is within reason… everyone has the right to be frustrated and some people nowadays can be flat out ridiculous at times when it comes to lack of understanding or context… but for the most part… it always pays off to take the high road and vent your frustrations through doing everything you can to super-serve that person in that moment.
The Bottom Line is …Sometimes doing good makes you feel good, even though you may not want to!