The best service is the service our customers don’t need

When I look through customer feedback I frequently read „The Tech Support was great but I should not have needed to call them. The product arrived without documentation so that I didn’t know how to use it. The interaction with your company does not meet my expectations.“

Customer Service and Technical Support very often are those who have to rescue what went wrong before. And no matter how great we may do our jobs, the reputation of our company will suffer. Leaving it to service to heal a customer relationship should not be the substitute for getting it right the first time. Yes, service teams can recover angry customers but only if the rest of the company takes the responsibility to prevent that to be neccessary. Else the same mistake may happen again and this customer is definitely lost. We recently had a customer whom we sent the same wrong product for 3 times, because of a repeated mistake in production. No matter how great Tech Support did their job, this customer is lost forever and don’t blame Tech Support for it!

From production and quality assurance I often hear that they want to see the relevance before they look into a problem. They don’t want to be bothered with exceptional cases. I understand that by fixing common mistakes we can improve our quality and benefit many customers. But I learned as well that the exceptional cases should always be fixed first as often they are low hanging fruits. And for the one customer affected they are really annoying.

I personally think that the best service is the one our customer don’t need. Second best is to learn from mistakes and prevent them happeing again. Worst is to use Service to rescue what went wrong before.