– Lucy Glennon specializes in customer service training and recruitment and hiring. She can be reached at 866.645.2047 or lucyg@hireguru.com. www.hireguru.ca.
CUSTOMER SERVICE – What do you look at as great customer service? Most likely it’s not something huge, but some set of little things. Or it may even be just one little thing. Why are those little things so important?
When you look at your little things that matter, they really all have to do with expectations. And when it comes down to it,that has to do with past experiences.
Whenever we have experiences, we keep a mental recording of them. And from that point forward, we’re always comparing against similar situations. That’s how we come up with our expectations.
If we’ve experienced really good customer service, that can become our expectation with a particular business, or even an entire industry. And if we have a really bad experience, we may avoid the place altogether because our expectation is that it could easily happen again.
Depending on what you do, your clients may or may not have any past experiences to compare you to. But does that mean they won’t have expectations?
Of course not. They’ll still be based on experiences. But they’ll either be based on experience of others, or their own experiences with something they believe is similar.
You may have been out to eat at a restaurant for the first time, and you were absolutely blown away by the service. What were you comparing it to?
If you go to a high-end steak house, you are probably expecting a different level of service than you would at a fast food restaurant. But if you go to a restaurant with similar prices to the high-end steak house, you probably do expect the same level of service.
Most of the time, that’s not even a conscious thing! But if you pay attention to what your clients say and how they act, and you ask them questions about those things, you can change some of the small things that will make a huge difference to them.