How is your customer service? It is such an important part of every business and yet small businesses often fail to pay enough attention to it – curious since many of those same businesses will tell you that it is their customer service that sets them apart from their competitors.
We’ve had cause to look at our customer service a couple of times in the last month or so. As a part of our service, we provide email for folks. So when email doesn’t work, we get called. Interestingly enough, the problem is rarely with our service.
One customer emailed me because his largest customer suddenly quit accepting emails from him and also refused to deliver emails to him. From his perspective, it was our problem.
The first thing we did was check carefully through our systems and logs to see if there were any problems on our end that we could iron out for him. There weren’t.
We always take customer service seriously. So instead of telling him, as most email providers would, that the problem was not on our end, we reached out, through him, to his customer’s IT staff. Their first response was that they had no problem on their end. But their second response – we are persistent – was that perhaps there might be an issue.
All told we spent over three hours helping our customer’s client resolve their email issue. That started because our customer turned to us for help. I’m not suggesting everyone turn to us for help. I am suggesting that we strengthened our client relationship by staying with the problem instead of pushing it off on someone else.
When we have experiences, good or bad, with customer service, we always hold them up as mirror to see how we compare.
Yes, we build great web sites. Yes we develop some of the most amazing things for our customers. But when we say our buzzwords are Partner, Engage, Convert, we take each one very seriously and that partnering means that we help you solve your problems.