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The Importance of Providing Quality Customer Service in Today's Economy

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Due to the fragile economy and the similarities of product offerings, providing quality customer service is more important than ever for maintaining and growing a company. Providing quality customer service has a much more defined meaning and is different from providing "exceptional" customer service. Exceptional customer service is usually fulfilling a customer's needs based on one particular instance that may or may not be repeated. Providing quality customer service means meeting the material as well as the emotional needs of a customer before, during and after the initial purchase or contact and having sufficient processes in place where the same level of service is provided consistently. In other words, it is adopting the quality …show more content…

In some part, this is a result of the companies treating the employee's as numbers by not investing in training, providing a good work environment or helping the employee understand the importance their role plays in the business process. According to a survey of over 500 restaurant owners at the restaurantowner.com website (Survey Results: Customer Service Survey, n.d), 70% stated that is important to teach or train employees basic social skills such as smiling, eye contact, attitude and conversational skills. Another fact that drives this point is that the same survey shows that 80% of the restaurant owners stated that hiring the right person for the job was the most important part of this process. To compound these challenges a lot of companies have also been put into a position where they have had to make the hard choice of reducing staff members. Usually this means there are fewer front line, customer facing employees. The difficulty comes in when even though most people know the situation that the economy is in, they still expect a high level of customer service and commitment from the companies they do business with. Peggy Morrow had an article published on the Inc.com website (Morrow, 2000) that gives a nice breakdown of the areas that companies need to work on in order to provide a higher level of customer service. Morrow encourages companies to make it clear that customer service is the job of everyone, not

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