The art of customer service

In this day and age, we are all in the customer service business. But what is good customer service?

To my mind, the essence of customer service is to deal with the customer in a polite and friendly manner, starting with the assumption that the ‘customer is always right’. When I worked at a coffee shop in Toronto that is exactly what I was told by my boss.

Her point, which she explained beautifully, was that when one goes on stage to perform, you have to leave your problems behind. You can’t carry your life issues into the life of the character you are playing.

Nandos, the peri-peri fast food chain, has a unique approach to customer service training. All their employees are told that if a customer is getting upset or agitated, the employee should get down on one knee to listen. This way their eyeline is lower than the customers. Psychologically, the impact of such an action is that the other person calms down because the other is showing subordination. When a person hovers above the other, the natural inclination is to stand up and talk to the person eye to eye, which usually leads to further agitation.

A few days ago, I walked up to the PIA counter at the Lahore airport in a cheery mood and handed over my ticket printout. When I received my boarding pass, I realised that my pre-allocated window seat had been changed to an aisle seat. I pointed out to the gentleman behind the counter that my seat has been pre-assigned. He requested me to ask the woman two counters over to fix this since she was the traffic supervisor.

Madam supervisor told me that no seat had been pre-allocated to me. I looked at her in surprise, smiled and showed her my ticket printout which I had printed myself from the PIAC website. She told me that this was incorrect, that I was a liar and so was my travel agent. I tried to respond but she had already turned to the next customer.

By comparison, the purser on board the flight itself could not have been more different. When I asked him to change my seat, he was polite, attentive and efficient. He also switched me over to my originally pre-allocated seat, which — by the way — was lying empty. In fact, the man apologised so many times that I was embarrassed by the end of it.

Just to clarify, the point here is that institutions need to care about customer service.

I have some knowledge of what customer service entails because when I host people on my show, they are the customers and it is my job to keep them happy. I know customer service is not easy. But I also know there is no margin for being rude or disrespectful. In my case, not only are there millions of people watching, but there is also my producer and the rest of the PTV hierarchy keeping an eagle eye on things.

Obviously, not everybody can be under constant scrutiny. But, one innovation that we should consider adopting in Pakistan is to have cameras recording interactions between customer service representatives and the customer. That protects both customers and service people because it is no longer a question of one person’s word against another.

Now if only the CEOs of companies took a real interest in hiring their staff personally and made changes, we wouldn’t have our whole day ruined because someone decided to have a hissy fit.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 28^th, 2014.

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