Read my rather contrary post here — gauravonomics.com/blog/is-customer-service-the-new-marketing-of-course-not/.

Unless you dont work, no matter what you do, you serve customers in some way.
Just because our public relations jobs dont involve direct sales, doesnt mean we cant help our organizations meet or exceed the expectations of cu…

It’s quite often the little kindness that elevate good customer service into customer delight. A few months ago I bought a sympathy card at an Eckerd store. The cashier handed me a silk rose that was for sale by the cash register and said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” WoW .. guess where I shop .. or use to until they closed the store and merged with CVS and the staff seems not to care?

However, in order to achieve great customer service the people who are giving that service must be treated well and appreciated by their companies. Sybil Stershic recently published a terrific book “Taking care of your the people who matter most” – http://tinyurl.com/2rcpqp. So while you do not have a business without a customer you do not have excellent service without the people who are the heart of your brand – your employees.

Your readers might want to checkout http://www.Measuredup.com a leading customer service review site.

I read your article with curiosity as we deal with this issue all time and it is clear customer service is lacking more then ever in the digital age at a time when consumers have more power then before to make a statement and derail or build a brand.

Thanks,

Marc
Measuredup.com

I’ll admit to having done it myself. I hate the way Walmart does business, and I vow not to shop there… but every now and then, I’m in a hurry and it’s the closest place and I slink in and slink out vowing to be stronger, next time.

WiredHub will stay in business because they offer dirt-cheap hosting and people will be willing to play the odds to save some cash. The Best no longer wins over The Cheapest in this country.

And if 10, 2000, or 50,000 people discuss it online together? Well that’s a whole other ball game. Pretty cool.

It was beginning to seem like business had forgotten the whole “customer is always right” concept for a while there. Glad that’s over.

I said the following in a post back in June: “Sometimes bad PR is unavoidable, but in a lot of cases, it’s just bad customer service and social media is allowing people to share these experiences with a very large audience.”

What bothers me is that while social media is making more people aware of problems–and giving them a voice to have bad service corrected–quite frankly it shouldn’t come to this.

I worked at a retail outlet for a few years that had one simple motto we were all required to keep in mind, which was “Do The Right Thing.” Note, this wasn’t “the customer is always right,” just do the right thing. We screwed up occasionally, it happens. When we did, we fixed it, quickly.

It helped tremendously that the company extended the power to actually correct things down to the front line employees (for the most part–major discounts still had to be approved by mgmt.).

If more companies would train and trust their front-line employees, I think there would be better service all around. Good service=good word of mouth marketing=good PR. Simple.

Jen