To Businesses - Good customer service can save your a**

                                                                                 -1-

Poor customer service is my pet peeve. It gets my blood boiling in an instant. I don't know how it came to be like this. Perhaps because of the nature of my job in BPOs when I used to work full time. Or maybe it is just because I am the kind of person who would not think twice before taking my business elsewhere if I have been subjected to poor customer service.

Let me begin with an invaluable piece of wisdom by Mahatma Gandhi -

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.”

Now if every business establishment large or small would live by this wisdom, people like me could find something else to crib about.

Good customer service is the edge your business needs.

No matter what business you are in, the products or services that you offer can only be a little different that your competitors. Unless of course you are selling tickets to Mars or the secret to eternal youth or something like that. You get the drift. Even if you manage to create a unique product or provide a service that nobody has thought of providing so far, it is only a matter of time before your competitors replicate the idea and lure your customers. 

Think about it. How different can you be anyway? After a point, the services offered by two service providers become quite similar. The call rates, network coverage, tariffs of a mobile service provider can differ from a competitor's offerings only so much. The services offered by your beauty salon can only differ from those offered by another by a dot. Any pastry shop can offer the goodies that yours does. Any restaurant can feature the same dishes that your restaurant does. The point is, there will always be competitors who have the resources and ability to match your best offers, no matter what business you are in.

The only thing that could keep customers coming back to a business is EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE.

As a customer most of us would not mind driving an extra mile or paying a little extra to spend our hard earned money at a place that values their customers. I doubt any of us would return to a shop or store where we have experienced poor customer service once.

Whether you eat at a five star restaurant or at a roadside vendor, you would most likely not visit the place again if you had even one unpleasant experience as a customer. Wouldn't you be pleasantly surprised if the staff at a salon you've visited only once before, remembers your name? We all love personalized attention and courtesy. So then as a business owner, how much more important should it be for you to concentrate on providing excellent customer service?

Read on for a few examples of how customer service can impact the bottom line of a business.

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