Customer Service Translates to Customer Loyalty

Many organizations understand the importance of customer service, yet only a select few are doing it right. i run my organization with customer service as the foundation — in fact it’s one of the first things new employees see when they join the company.

Our organization prides itself on providing outstanding customer service to ALL customers and EVERYONE is viewed as a customer.

Unfortunately, the good intentions of most companies get mired in unnecessary process and operational overhead. Even if employees had a strong desire to deliver amazing customer service, they aren’t trusted to do so.

I’m sure you’ve seen it first hand many times, “I’m sorry sir, I would love to help you with that request but I’ll need to get approval from my boss, who will need to get approval from their boss, and even though giving you a $5 credit will create long term customer loyalty, it’s our policy to never give refunds. Blah. Blah. Blah. Hate you customer. Blah. Blah. Blah.”

This experience has become common place and accepted, so when we find an organization that gives half a shit about customer service, we are blown away.

i’ve been a loyal Amazon customer for more than 20 years. i’ve never had any problems with them until recently. i ordered a book and was really excited to receive it. Checking the mail each day after work, i would become more and more frustrated that the book hadn’t shown up. i checked the shipping status and it hadn’t been updated for 4 days.

CLUE #1 that Amazon cares deeply about providing amazing customer service.

So i decided to contact Amazon, which by the way they make super simple. They already know my outstanding orders and all I had to do was complete a simple form.

CLUE #2 that Amazon cares deeply about providing amazing customer service.

Within 15 minutes, i received a reply from Amazon: “I’m very sorry to hear you haven’t received your package. With the number of days that passed, I’m afraid your shipment was lost in transit. I’d like to make this right for you, I’ve placed a new order that’s listed below. There’s no charge for this replacement order. I then upgraded the shipping method to One-Day Shipping to ensure you receive it as soon as possible, at no extra charge to you.”

WAIT!!!! WHAT?!? AWESOME!!!!!

Did I really just have that experience? Does Amazon care that much about my loyalty as a customer that they have enabled their support staff to take care of me in such an efficient manner?

Take a look around your organization. Do you trust your employees to make the right decisions or have you insulated every decision they make with process? Customer Service isn’t going away, in fact the importance of quality Customer Service is becoming increasingly more and more important. If you want to do it right, hire people you trust, empower them to take care of your customers, remove unnecessary process & procedures, and just freaking care.