Customer Service is Not Like Star Trek

I admit it, I like Star Trek and hopefully you’ll continue reading this.

Customer Service is not like Star Trek! In Star Trek, battles in outer space are centered on space ships’s shields. The first one to lose their shields is destroyed.

Keeping your shields up in customer service is the destroyer. Shielding yourself and your organization from customer interaction is destructive to the customer experience. Lower your protective shield and win the great customer service battle.

Top Sources of Customer Satisfaction Are Related to Customer Experience

Creating positive customer experiences is the key in great customer service. In a recent study, Press Ganey Associates polled nearly 140,000 customers in roughly 230 different establishments in a specific field of service providers. The results were very interesting.

The top 15 sources of customer satisfaction were related to customer interactions with staff members and employee satisfaction among staff members.

It’s almost to say that it doesn’t matter wether the answer for your customer is yes or no, but it’s how you work with and treat the customer that matters. Ok, maybe the answer does matter, but it’s not the only factor. Or at least, not as an important factor as we make it out to be.

Every extra layer between your customers and you is an extra layer to the customer service shield preventing great customer service experiences from happening. Each additional hoop customers have to jump through before getting service adds to the customer service shield keeping your customers from having meaningful, personal, loyalty creating experiences.

Each layer added to the customer service shield saves a little money by reducing the number of customer service issues you have to handle. But in the end, customers are so frustrated by the massive shield keeping them from being able contact you and get things done that they just give up and leave.

Lower your shields! They block good customer service experiences from happening.

We spent thousands and thousands of dollars in marketing and advertising trying to get customers to come to us and give our organization a chance. Once we have them, we then create hassles for the customer at every turn, as if we we’re bothered that the customer is contacting us. Too often, it’s written in some company policy manual that this is the way we have to do things.

Give your front-line employees as much authority as possible. They’re the ones who know best what the customer needs are right then and there.

May your great customer service make you live long and prosper.

Learn from the Nordstrom customer service school and re-write the policies that are keeping up the barriers between your customers, you, and the great customer service experience.

Nordstrom Rules: Rule #1: Use best judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.