By Felix C. Veroya
About two (2) years ago, I was invited by a student organization from a leading university in Manila to deliver a keynote about how data analytics help businesses and organizations. My wife and myself arrived at the venue earlier and decided to have our lunch at a Japanese restaurant located on the ground floor of the hotel where the conference is being held. I ordered ramen while my wife a bento set. As we are in the middle of our meal, I noticed something in my ramen and confirmed with my wife that is what it is – a dead mosquito.
I asked the waiter to check on the ramen and he insisted that it was not a mosquito but some small-sized nori. He asked for my ramen bowl and brought it into the kitchen. After few minutes, he went back with the chef and told that it was just nori.
This is the time I started to be disturbed. Something is not being done based on the standard operating procedure, so I asked for the supervisor to explain what is happening. They are persistent with their claim that it is not indeed a dead mosquito. To cut the story short, we left the restaurant with two (2) pieces of their signature ensaymada from their partner pastry shop inside the hotel.
Funny thing is that they never admitted that indeed it was a mosquito. Unfortunately, I have not taken a photo as proof before the waiter has taken out my half-filled ramen from our table. I never completed my meal and was never asked by these people to replace it.
As we are driving back home after my talk, someone called me and introduced herself as the Filipino manager counterpart for the restaurant. She was not there when the incident happened and apologized on how her team handled the complaint. I explained to her that Process Excellence is one of my practices and consider my call to the situation a gift so that they can improve on their customer service.
Moral of the story? Always practice excellent customer service. As a business, it is a disaster when someone talks about a bad story especially in this digital age as the spread of information is way faster.
With this, I have come up with some recommendations that MSMEs can follow to deliver excellent customer service.
- Respond as quick as possible. As customer concern arises, make sure that there are available resources in your organization to address this. The more time they wait to find a company representative to handle their concerns or platforms or channels where they can submit their issues, the more aggravated their concerns become. Speed is one component if you want to become a customer service rockstar.
- Listen to your customers. Make sure that you hear and understand what your customers are complaining or raising as their issues and concerns about your processes, products, or services. This will make the resolution process as smooth as possible and to also be a basis for improvements so that similar cases not to recur. Listening is also empathizing of what they are feeling and why they are frustrated about their experience with what you are providing or rendering to your customers.
- Solve the problems. Not taking full responsibility of your mistakes could cost your company reputation. Learn to identify the root causes of the complaints and fix it on a process level and not just commit some band aid solutions to your customers to close the complaint ticket. Assess the system for any possible loophole and fix it right away so your customers will not return with the same concern after a couple of days.
- Close with feedback. Make sure that a functional feedback mechanism is in place for customer to hear what happened to their complaints and for them to finally continue using their products and/or services. If you can offer them something in exchange of the inconvenience, offering this can somehow mend a potentially breaking customer relation. Make sure that the feedback is something that your customer would want to hear not just because the content is good but as well as its delivery is done smoothly.
- Thinking of lifetime value. Think long term when dealing with customers. Customer spreading good things about your business is a marketing strategy that is free of charge. Make sure you are on top of your customer service if you want to create a business brand that excels among the competition.
Customer service level affects both existing and potential customers. Based on a study, about 70% of customer who experienced bad customer service tends to tell their network about it and about 50% tend to jump to your competing business.
Let’s continue to be #significantlybetter in our customer service, together!
Wanna talk? Get in touch with me thru fcveroya@asklexph.com