Delivering Consistency In your Business’ Customer Service

Running your own small business is no picnic. Sure, you’ve liberated yourself from the rat race. You’ve unshackled yourself from a job where your potential was wasted and your skills were starting to atrophy. Of course you no longer have to stagnate in a regressive workplace culture amidst people whose drive and ambition have been dulled by the comforting numbness of the 9 to 5. Would you ever go back? Absolutely not. But that doesn’t mean that running your own small business isn’t a challenging and often frustrating endeavor. The long hours, the virtually ever present stress, the impostor syndrome that nags away at you, telling you that any minute now you’ll be identified as the fraud you are… It can all conspire to make you throw your hands up in the air and ask yourself “Why?”.

And you know what… That’s a pretty pertinent question.

The “why” of what you do is enormously important. It defines your mission statement. It lays the foundations upon which your entire business is built. It’s your totem and your mantra. It’s the thing that you keep coming back to time and again to give you a renewed sense of purpose and see past the trappings of running a business; the stress, the strain and the niggles to get that valuable perspective on what really matters. The “why” may change as your business evolves. The “why” may mean something slightly different to you than it does to your employees, and that’s okay. Your “why” is your own but there’s a very good chance that it involves making the world a better place and enriching the lives of others. It’s this second factor that we’re going to focus on here. Customer service enables us to make a real and meaningful difference in people’s lives. We can lend a helping hand to those that need it most and leave people a whole lot happier and more fulfilled than when we met them. But in an increasingly impersonal and remote (largely digital) marketplace, it begs the question…

In the digital age, does customer service really matter?

We’re constantly told that customers are getting increasingly fickle despite businesses spending a small fortune trying to retain them. In the digital age, customers have more choice than ever and are empowered to make purchasing decisions on their own terms. In this climate one might argue that customer service is on the way out. Today’s customers want cheap, they want quick and they want a minimum of hassle, and they’re prepared to compromise on quality to get it. And while this may ring true for some customers, make no mistake customer service is more important than ever.

As tempting as it may see to race our competitors to the bottom, offering low price, low quality goods and services, this simply isn’t a sustainable model. We shouldn’t abandon our customer service principles because the market is growing ever more competitive. If anything this gives us more of a reason to cling to them. Great customer service can be one more USP that we have over our competitors. It can incentivize positive feedback on public forums like social media. It can strengthen our relationship with our customers and enrich the experience of not only our employees but our customers and ourselves.

But as passionate as we may be about delivering customer service, all enterprises struggle with the old chestnut called consistency. After all, our customers have the right to expect an outstanding experience from us every time. If you’re to deliver consistently excellent customer service it needs to be reflected in your…