Customer Service, Customer Satisfaction, and Defining the Customer Experience

There are distinct differences between CUSTOMER SERVICE and CUSTOMER SATISFACTION and at the same time they meld together to form an EXPERIENCE, and it is this experience that can make or break any company.

There are varying statistics out there about how viral an experience can be – a happy customer tells 1 person, an unhappy customer tells 10– but I believe this to be magnified greatly by the thousands of new media out there today that has effectively given everyone a global voice. Unhappy customers whether for the right or wrong reasons, tell anyone and everyone who visits their blog or posts, is part of their LinkedIn or Facebook community, or if we are really lucky has created a YouTube video for millions to download. Business owners today cannot afford to mess up – one person can force you to close your doors forever.

Customer service is in some cases a forgotten term. I run into poor examples of customer service all of the time and I don’t know when it started. Nearly every time I am in a checkout line, the attendant fails to make eye contact, greet me or if can you imagine – hang up their cell phone.

Customer service is a series of interactions that leads to customer satisfaction. A customers’ satisfaction has a lasting effect in terms of their perception of you and your company…one poor interaction and it could be curtains.

I challenged my team this year to not only provide best in class customer service to yield high customer satisfaction for our clients, but to take it one step further. I want them to actually DEFINE THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE. Sometimes this can be compromised due to the nature of our business, technology – let’s face it – it is quirky at times, but the things we can control, our interactions and the ways we choose to deal with difficult situations.

Roger Staubuch once said “There are no traffic jams along the extra mile” and I agree wholeheartedly. Few decide to own their fate and go that extra mile – and I want my team to own theirs. On a monthly basis we survey our clients to determine if they would recommend NetTeks to others – and their responses are taken very seriously. We work tirelessly to do right by our clients, and define their experience, making it one that they are happy to blog, record or chat about.

So, the NetPerspective is, good companies, become great companies, when they take a leadership role in their clients, and their own, fate.