In the old days, Customer Service was the woman who answered the phone when you called about the lemon you had just bought. She was the one who told you, in nice terms and warm tones, what you could do with it …which wasn’t much. But she had a smile in her voice, and you felt good about being ignored, at least until you got off the phone
Things have changed dramatically over the past decades. Now customer service is all the rage: it’s in the air and every commercial. Many businesses have even moved beyond Customer Service to Customer Satisfaction and Customer Success – a clever way to show progress while using the same initials so they don’t have to change the towels or stationery. Other firms, in their efforts to distance themselves from their competitors, have leapfrogged the whole CS nomenclature to “Customer Delight” and “Rewarding the Customer.”
At the core of this revolution in business thought is the realization that (1) customers buy things; (2) if the things they buy are the things you sell, your profits will improve; (3) therefore, it’s a good idea to sell things that customers want; and that (4) you should treat your customers nicely so they come back and buy more things. Now this may seem obvious to you, but it’s taken us in business quite a while to figure it out.
Of course, the degree to which these programs are emphasized varies from industry to industry. Retailers are big dispensers of these slogans, probably in order to reduce the amount of face-to-fist contact between clerks and clientele. In manufacturing, where no customers roam the aisles, there are plenty of signs, but many few management lectures on the subject.
Yes, all this talk about the customer being first is wonderful, especially to someone like me who has never had much luck in being first at anything. But I have just one question:
If everyone is into Customer Service, who hired the people who always wait on me?