Customer Service: Do Smaller Companies have an Edge?
In his blog at Harvard Business Publishing, Anthony Tjan argues that smaller organizations can often beat out their large competitors on customer service. Common hurdles for large organizations include too much bureaucracy and complicated rules. Scripted responses from customer service agents are especially problematic, as they often don’t convey the empathy needed to calm a frustrated customer.
Tjan offers Nordstrom as an example of a large company excelling at customer service, although he suggests Nordstrom may have modeled more of their business practices after small companies. Either way, Spector and McCarthy’s The Nordstrom Way is a customer service guide that we recommend to clients in both large and small organizations.
Tjan hit the nail on the head in his conclusion:
“For my money, the two best customer-service practices are sincere empathy over indifferent calmness and common sense over standard operating procedure. These two simple guiding principles remind us how easy it can be to transform the customer experience, and how unfortunate it is that more businesses have not done so.”
One of our business analysis experts here at CMA, Ed Hamilton, encourages us to look for what he calls the “wow factor” – some way to go above and beyond to wow the customer. Ed is a semi-retired gentleman who began his career in the computer and data processing services industry where he rose from Marketing Representative to VP of Marketing and Client Services for a $1.2 billion international company before serving as President and COO of an engineering and manufacturing company. One anecdote he uses to help us understand the “wow factor” is a time when he and other members of his team paid a surprise visit to one of their client’s plants in the middle of the night to connect with members of the night shift and show their devotion to the client.
We strive to abide by these principles and wow our customers, and we encourage our clients to do the same with theirs and offer support to help them.
What do you do at your organization to provide outstanding customer service? What do you do to wow your clients?
