What is Customer Service? That is a question that a lot of companies are asking themselves today in order to ensure continued growth or just stimulate it. Customer Service has become increasingly important to companies since prices have bottomed out, companies are looking for ways to differentiate themselves from the competition. Providing great customer service is not achieved by doing just one thing, it is a combination of multiple ideas, standards, policies, values, research, databases, etc. This paper will highlight some of those things using the gap models of customer service.

The first thing that the company needs to focus on is what are the customer’s expectations and desires. One of the biggest problems that a company faces is that their expectation of exceptional service is different than the customers, so their service performance falls short of expectations. A lack of understanding the customer’s expectations is due to the fact that the company has lost touch with the customer, both literally and physically. A couple of ways that this can be overcome are: (1) survey or ask the customers what they expect and (2) get closer to the customer by using relationship marketing techniques, which forms a bond between the customer and the employee/company.

Once the company has gained an understanding of the customer’s expectations they need to develop service standards or strategies. However, another problem associated with the delivery of outstanding customer service is that the individuals who design the standards do not have an understanding of the customer's expectations. So the new standards or procedures do not meet the desired expectations of the customer, so you are back at square one. It is important that the customer’s expectations are conveyed by management the individual or group designing the standards or strategies. Once the standards/strategies have been completed, have a couple of your customers review them for accuracy, effectiveness and content.

Even if a company has discovered what the customer expects and has translated that into an effective customer service strategy, it does not guarantee that their employees are going to provide excellent customer service. It is imperative that the company and middle management support this initiative. The employees have to understand the new customer satisfaction strategy and what is expected of them, if the level of customer service is going to change. This is also where you have to evaluate what type of employees are coming in contact with the customers and which managers are overseeing the front line employees. The company may have to move employees and managers around, which may mean hiring and firing, in order to get the right mix of people to implement the new strategy. Something that will also make this new strategy more effective is the implementation of an incentive/reward type system. The purpose of this is to recognize top performers in the area of customer service and of course motivate all the employees.

The last area that can damage your customer service reputation is the area of external communication with the customer. External communication can be defined as promises made to the customer through advertising, salesmen, etc, which may raise the expectations of the customer. The potential problem is that you are not prepared to meet these raised expectations and fail in the eyes of the customer. It is very important that the company’s policies and procedures, concerning customer service, be communicated throughout the organization.

There are a couple of other points in addition to what has been mentioned above that are necessary to ensure that your customer service policies and procedures are successful. First, maintain a customer database, which will enable you to understand who your customer is and will make it easier to design your customer service around them. Secondly, measure your performance from a customer’s perspective. This would require conducting customer surveys and analyzing their results. Lastly, you need to identify your unhappy customers. Typically companies only hear from 4% of their unhappy customers, so the other 96% leave without saying a thing. It is important to remember it is 5 times more expensive to replace a customer than to retain one. The following are 5 reasons why customers leave.

• 15% Leave Because They Found Better Service
• 15% Leave Because They Found Cheaper Service
• 20% Leave Because Of Lack Of Contact And Individual Attention
• 49% Leave Because The Service Was Poor
• 1% Leave For Other Reasons

In conclusion, if the customer service policies and procedures have been designed to target your customers, a corporate culture is established to support the expected level of customer service and customer service performance is continually measured, your customer service program will be successful.

Listed below are a couple of web sites that will provide you information on customer service as well as examples of excellent customer service:

 References Used

1. Valerie A. Zeithaml, and Mary Jo Bitner, Services Marketing (McGraw Hill Companies, Inc., 1996).

2. Philip Kotler, Marketing Management, 9^th ed. (Simon and Schuster, 1997).

3. www.gday-mate.com/whyleave