Examples of Great Customer Service aren’t as easy to find as we’d like. I’m from New York, so I’m a bit less patient than many of my friends, and a bit more demanding. That make recognizing “standouts” in providing good service easy.
Forbes Magazine’s consumer advocate has written about the authoritative American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) recognizes the companies that treat their customers best. You might find some of the names on the list surprising:
- Chic-fil-A
- Trader Joe’s
- Aldi
- Amazon
- Lexus
- Costco Wholesale
- HEB Grocery
- Toyota
Top Service across all industries
The top ACSI choices cut across all product categories, from groceries to luxury cars, fast food to internet search engines (can you guess which one that is?). Great service isn’t just reserved for high priced purchases. And many rank at the top of Glassdoor’s “best places to work” survey.
You might also be surprised at how good the service is at some “low price” companies: some “discounters” rank well ahead of pricey Apple (#13) and Fedex (#19).
Last week I bought a new iPhone. It arrived a day before it was scheduled to get here. But within 6 days, it had “turned itself off” 7 times. That was really disappointing. And I anticipated a long difficult process to replace it.
When I finally found the right phone number, the voice at the other end of the line was evidently from an overseas call center. Was this going to work?
Yes. It did. The rep immediately knew my name, my order number and the item I had purchased. He placed me on “hold” for about 2 minutes, and when he returned he had a resolution: my replacement phone would be sent out within 24 hours. Without my even asking for it. That’s customer service.
How do you evaluate the customer service you deliver?
Customer service reps face disappointed, and annoyed customers, all day, every day. The only thing that can make the phone calls they handle better is a great company behind them. Great companies make it easy to make the customer happy, by offering things like:
- First Call Resolution (like I was offered)
- Customer Waiting Time: 60% of customers feel that being put on hold for even one minute is too long. If you do place calls on hold, or they wait in a customer service queue, the time seems to go faster if callers are listening to something interesting.
- Customer Greeting: sound professional. Sound friendly. (that’s what I heard)
- Ability to solve the problem: empowering your Customer Service Reps (CSR’s) to solve the problem is key (like I was offered)
There are plenty of other goals to strive for, but these are good ones to try for.
Examples of Great Customer Service: how do you compare to others in your industry? Or to ACSI leaders?
Hiring enough customer service reps and training them so they can solve problems isn’t cheap. But customers will consider great service…priceless.
Here’s a simple idea that can help
Here’s an idea that might help: a professional recorded “greeting” at your service center, and interesting messages on hold that make “hold” time more interesting can help. You can find out more about adding both to your phone system by clicking here, or by calling Informer Messages on hold at 800-862-8896.
