Treat Them With Respect

You've probably heard the phrase “the customer's always right”. Well, I bet they aren't, but I also know that to maintain good customer service more often than not you have to pretend like they are. Please realize that your customers are people just like you. They also have bad days and good days, they have stress and inconvenience just as much as you. Good customer service comes a lot easier if you realize this early in your company's life.

Let's walk through a typical example of bad customer service before we go into a good example of great customer service and then an example of mediocre customer service.

I was in an accounting class a few years ago where we had to do research on the financial statements of two competitors and then report on our findings. We chose two candy companies. A friend of mine wrote to both companies to see if they would give us some free goods to give to the students in our class when we presented. One company sent some fliers too late to pass out; not exactly what we were hoping for. The package from the other company came and we found there were enough containers of candy for each class member to have their own. They went above and beyond and to this day I'm still telling people about this company and how cool they are. I forgot what the other company even was. You see, the company that sent us the candy bought some great word of mouth marketing with the gift. The other company kind of fell by the wayside with their mediocre customer service.