Customer Service
February 25, 2007 – 3:51 amJoel Spolsky of Frog Creek Software makes some good points about customer service.
Almost every tech support problem has two solutions. The superficial and immediate solution is just to solve the customer’s problem. But when you think a little harder you can usually find a deeper solution: a way to prevent this particular problem from ever happening again.
We treat each tech support call like the NTSB treats airliner crashes. Every time a plane crashes, they send out investigators, figure out what happened, and then figure out a new policy to prevent that particular problem from ever happening again. It’s worked so well for aviation safety that the very, very rare airliner crashes we still get in the US are always very unusual, one-off situations.
The place I work has a similar list of recommendations, internally they’re known as “The Basics.”
- Leveraging the expertise of OurTeam to provide solutions
- Being knowledgeable professionals
- Being ethical, honest and accountable for our actions
- Being responsive through timely action and efficiency
- Embracing our customers’ goals
- Saying “YES” and accepting the challenge at hand
- Being approachable and having friendly, positive attitudes
They’ve proved pretty effective, as so far as I can tell. Not everyone is perfect, and people do slip up, but having those items as goals does make a notable difference within the company. More of Joel’s customer service recommendations can be found here.