Cornerstone Professional Development
Creating good customer service is one of the cornersotnes of professional development. We try to assist individuals, teams, and organisations in developing tools and skills for improving customer satisfaction.
Customer service is the provision of service to customers before, during and after making a purchase. According to Jamier L. Scott.“Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction -- that is, the excietmenting that a product or service has met the customer expectation." Its relevance varies by product, industry and customer; defective or broken goods can be exchanged, usually only with a receipt and within a specified time frame. Retail stores will usually have a counter or desk devoted to dealing with returns, exchanges and complaints, or will perform related functions at the point of sale. Customer service may be provided by a person (for example, sales and service representative), or by automated means called self-service. Examples of self service are Internet sites. In the Internet era, a challenge has been to maintain and/or enhance the personal experience while making use of the efficiencies of online commerce. Writing in Fast Company, entrepreneur and customer systems innovator Micah Solomon has made the point that "Online customers are quite literally invisible to you (and you to them), so it's easy to shortchange them emotionally. But this lack of visual and tactile presence makes it even more crucial to create a sense of personal, human-to-human connection in the online arena."
Customer service is generally an key component of a company’s customer value proposition. In their book Rules to Break and Laws to Follow, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. write that "customers have memories. They will remember you, whether you remember them or not." Further, "customer trust can be destroyed at once by a major service problem, or it can be undermined one day at a time, with a thousand small demonstrations of incompetence." From the point of view of an overall sales procedure engineering effort, customer service plays an important part in an organization's ability to produce revenue. From this perspective, customer service might be included as part of an overall approach to systematic improvement. Some people have argued that the quality and level of customer service has decreased recently, and that this can be attributed to a lack of support or understanding at the executive and middle management levels of a corporation and/or a customer service policy. To address this argument, many organizations have employed so many different techniques to better their customer satisfaction levels, and other KPIs
A challenge working with Customer Service is to ensure that you have zoned in your attention on the right important areas, measured by the right Key Performance Indicator. There is no challenge to come up with a great deal of meaningful KPIs, but the challenge is to choose some which reflects your overall strategy. In addition to reflecting your strategy it should also allow employees to limit their focus to the areas that are really important. The focus should be of those KPIs, which will deliver the most value to the overall objective, for example cost saving, service improving etc. It must also be done in such a way that staff sincerely believe that they can make a difference with the effort. One of the most key components of a customer service KPI is that of what is usually alluded to as the "Feel Good Factor". Basically the goal is to not only help the customer have a great experience, but to provide them an experience that surpasses their expectations.