Effective Principles to Improve Your Customer Service Skills

---

Customer service is ultimately misunderstood or at the very least, nearly impossible to define by consensus. From definitions that stress satisfaction such as “anything the customer thinks it is” to definitions that stress problem management such as “the ability to respond quickly to customer problems” current thinking tends to focus on customer service as an extension of marketing.

That perspective is understandable given statistics that indicate more than eighty percent of consumers have ceased relationships with a business for customer service driven reasons. Unfortunately, most of the available literature on this issue is task driven rather than principle driven, a particularly sad state of affairs given that customer service principles provide a framework by which the tasks are more effectively executed.

The Principle of Customer Service

The first and foremost principle of customer service is that its entire purpose is to ensure a reconciliation of customer expectations and experiences. Dissatisfaction with a product or enterprise occurs when an experience is less than expected and loyalty and ongoing patronage occur when an experience exceeds expectation. This is the fundamental customer relationship ratio, expected outcomes vs. actual outcomes.

Anyone intending to improve customer service skills must recognize the primary issue at hand is based on this issue. Almost all advertising and sales is driven by exploring needs, creating urgency by emphasizing the “pain” of those needs, and then offering a relief from that pain. This can be as simple as exaggerating thirst in a television commercial and then quenching it with a new, refreshing beverage. It can be as complicated as performing a complete needs analysis for a software upgrade and recommending an implementation strategy. Thus, expectations are set from the outset in reference to eliminating discomfort, hassle, and difficulty. The promised results occur when customer service as a skill becomes less necessary. When the reverse is true, however, reconciling the expectations with the experience is critical.

All other principles flow from the first. The second principle of customer service has dramatic impact on the first, and is simply that customers need easy access to information and solutions from the company. In some cases, this can be accomplished most effectively without direct interaction with an employee, but automated measures are often reluctantly adopted by a customer base, seen not as tools of convenience, but instead as “gatekeepers” that keep a customer from accessing a live person. Ease of interaction with support and service personnel becomes critical in order to prevent exacerbating the level of frustration already in place.

The Importance of Reassurance

In terms of the actual customer interaction, the overriding customer service principle must be the expression of reassurance that the company intends to reconcile the expectations with the results and then an honest attempt to do so. Although it’s not likely to be expressed in that manner, a customer desires to be heard, to be validated, and to be relieved. Thus, customer service personnel must listen and actively demonstrate that they are. (“If I understand what you’re saying, you can’t access your customer database without crashing you accounting software. Is that right?”) They must receive validation through agreement and apology. (“Wow, that’s not at all what should be happening, and it has to be hurting your operations right now. I’m so sorry you’re going through this.”) Finally, they need a solution. (“I think there’s a good chance that’s caused by a configuration problem during installation. Will you let me walk you through a change and see if we can fix it right now?”)

The decision to implement effective customer service principles in business is no longer a decision to outshine competition or to gain competitive advantage. In today’s world of customer empowerment and far less tolerance for unmet expectations, they’re a requirement for survival.