Great Customer Service Costs Almost Nothing

As consumers, we always complain when the customer service is bad. We blog, tweet, Facebook or tell our friends about it, sometimes all of the above. More often than not, when we received great customer service, we were happy and we said “Thank you, I’m very happy with your service” and if applicable, left a tip. We probably tell some friends about it, but less frequent than complaints, we blog, tweet or Facebook about it. As a result, we leave a virtual footprint of more complaints than praises.

Why is that?

Maybe it’s human nature, maybe psychologically we are wired to stick to negative feelings more strongly or maybe the experience was so infuriating, we just need to vent somewhere. Whatever the real cause is, we don’t need to vent when we are happy and on top of that, good customer service is expected. Therefore, writing about a good experience is somewhat “an effort”. As a little experiment, I Googled. “Bad service” yields 1,290,000,000 results, “good service” shows 939,000,000 results whereas “great service”, only 805,000,000. While this is very far from an actual indication of user experiences, it does indicate that we are more drawn to write in a negative connotation.

But what is great service? The most read articles (ranked top 2 in Google) for “great service” stated:

According to Fast Company’s 1997 article:

Who defines it? How do you know it when you deliver it? Good service is solving a problem – delivering what people expect to receive. Great service is getting below the surface of the problem – delivering what no one expects to receive. It’s listening, learning, assessing, refining.

About.com’s “The Ten Commandments of Great Customer Service” supports:

8. Give more than expected. Since the future of all companies lies in keeping customers happy, think of ways to elevate yourself above the competition. Consider the following:
What can you give customers that they cannot get elsewhere?
What can you do to follow-up and thank people even when they don’t buy?
What can you give customers that is totally unexpected?

Delivering great customer service may sound difficult and costly but I had a recent experience that proved otherwise. Whenever I fly, I have a standard response to the air hostess’ “What would you like to drink?”. “Tomato juice and a glass of water please”, is my usual reply. I did that on every flight, may it be a domestic or a half-way across the world flight. I got my tomato juice and water everytime, plus a smile. I got that from Singapore Airlines, Malaysian Airlines, Thai Airways, Lauda Air, Jet Airways, British Airways, New Zealand Air, Qantas and etc. That’s good service.

During my first and only flight with KLM, I got my tomato juice, water, a smile and the air hostess asked “Would you like salt and pepper with that?”. I felt something that I’ve never felt for an air hostess before. This feeling is so profound that I beamed from inside out and replied, “Yeah, that would be very nice!” with a very wide smile and gleaming eyes. That feeling is called happiness.

Why so happy over salt and pepper, you might ask. I find tomato juice a lot tastier with salt and pepper and a nice drink makes me very happy, simple as that.

Why do I find this onboard salt and pepper so special? Because no other air hostess offered me before and I’ve been flying since I was 3 years old.

So, for me, as a frequent traveller; the formula is:

Tomato juice = good customer service. It was what I expected and provided by any other airline.

Tomato juice, add salt and pepper =  great customer service. It was more than what I expected and not offered by other competitors.

The cost? It only took the air hostess a few seconds of her time and the cost of a small sachet of salt and pepper to deliver this happiness. Sounds a lot more achievable isn’t it? Every business, product and customer is different but all you have to do is find out what the salt and pepper are. You have a really good head start if your market is laden with bad customer service. This applies for both offline and online businesses.

We think that great customer service deserves be recognised and be published about more than complaints. Do you write about your good experiences? Which sites or platform do you use? We’d like to hear about it.