Periodically review all areas of your customer service policies. This is to ensure everyone on your team, including those in remote locations, understand all implications of your requirements. As a job seeker, take time to recognize how your previous work on a team, if not directly with clients, resembles customer service.
Three recent examples provide insight as to the importance of sound principles in place, and the forewarning of how some companies lose sight of the ultimate goal of increasing clientele.
Company Politics
A sharp team leader directed his sales team on how to serve clients well by maintaining focus on client needs in addition to company needs. Steep corporate goals were in place for the entire team. With due diligence and efficient work habits, the team surpassed their goals for the year by a large margin. The team leader was thrilled until he learned that while he was focused on the team succeeding, individuals were focused on company politics. In the end, a couple of others took credit for the team success, and the team leader is seeking new work.
While those individuals may benefit in the short term, the company will suffer in the long-term. Having lost an excellent team leader with politicking carrying more importance, it is most likely the results will be less than stellar as politics take over ambience of team work.
Resolving Glitches
Every once in a while websites are updated incurring lost files. Excellence in backup service is an upfront requirement, particularly if you are collecting money from clients to be on your website.
One such company lost files of some contributors. They asked their paying clients to go into their own files to resend the original links. This requires a lot of time to locate the links and test each one in order to compile a list of those broken. Instead, this should be the company's responsibility along with an apology.
To ensure retaining those clients, at least a couple months of service free of charge should be offered or substantial business may be lost.
Superb Customer Care
On a Sunday evening, I chose to send a company a brief polite email describing the case of personalized links to articles no longer working after years of enjoying the service. Within a few short minutes not only did I have a reply, but an exact answer for each of the 10 links sent as to why they were not working. The broken links were not the fault of this service but the fact that the pages pointed to were no longer in operation.
Given this was a Sunday evening following a holiday, and that a very thorough response was provided within a short timeframe, I will remain a very loyal client. The company is TinyURL.com
Conclusion
As you can tell, providing excellence in customer care promotes long-term loyalty to include repeat business, referrals and testimonials which was just provided for the company that personalizes your links; TinyURL.com.