If you ask anyone from a small business if they provide good customer service you will get 85-90% of them stating that they provide excellent service, in fact they will tell you that they provide the best service of all their competition in the industries. Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s mostly bullshit. Let me tell you why, and let me explain how I got to this reality and DONE it. I say facts because this is not perspective based thinking, it is what I know to be true from observations, experience and my knowledge of the market.
You see, before I retired I was running a franchise company and when we entered a new market we surveyed the customers of our competitor locations. We would ask customers if they thought customer service was good at the establishment they had just left. They didn’t know us from Adam, they didn’t know if we were related to the business owner, if we were competitors, or if we were just customers who wanted to know if the customer service was good there before buying something.
What we found is that most customers were not happy with the stores they shopped at, but shopped at those stores because there was no competition, or the competition was worse, therefore they had chosen the lesser of two evils. , sort of like how we vote for politicians in America. This is a warning to all business owners. It doesn’t matter what you think of your customer service, it matters what your customer thinks of your customer service. And the reality is that you need to close that gap.
The only way to do this is to survey your customers, perhaps using a third party. Find out what they like and don’t like, or get suggestions from your customers on how you can improve customer service. Now, finding out what your customers really think may burst your bubble, but it will make you a better business person, I guarantee. Please consider all this.