What Is Your Customer Service Worth?

Customer service is not always on our minds as leaders. It’s often seen as a cost, and little else.

What’s the purpose of customer service? You might think, to fix problems. With that mindset, it doesn’t make sense to invest much in it.

The thing is, it’s a little more complicated. Here are 7 purposes of customer service:

1. To answer questions
2. Yes, to solve problems
3. To educate your customers
4. Even better, to learn from your customers
5. To improve their experience of your company
6. To strengthen your relationship with your customer through empathy and care
7. To give your company another opportunity to have the desired impact.

These 7 purposes start to shift your perspective.

You can reduce your costs by designing a better product or service. By doing a stellar job at education in your manual, online, or in a video.

You can enhance your customer service ROI by learning from your customers so that you can do all these things better: design, execution, education, relationships, and  impact.

When someone makes the effort to call or email your company, your customer is giving you a second chance.

Your customer service staff have the opportunity to not only make it better, to build your relationship, and to decide to refer you or to buy again. These members of your team can make the difference between whether your company has its intended impact or not.

That’s worth the investment.

Confusion about what you want to achieve and what it costs helps no one.

If you engage with customers, be clear about what it’s worth to your company, what it is you want to achieve, and what it costs. Then decide and do that.