What is customer service?

To me it is all about understanding your customer, and tailoring your offering to suit them. As a customer and a human being, all I ask is that I am treated with courtesy and respect.  If I feel that I have been understood, and my needs appreciated, I will always be a loyal customer.

Too often I find myself interacting with people who do not understand this simple concept. They are often young people, with a touch of attitude, who have never been given any customer service training or even an explanation on how various customer  types should be handled.

Sometimes however, I come across more mature men and women, who ought to know better. The problem is that they think I have to appreciate how they are feeling, how difficult this is for them . “What you have to appreciate is”….. I’m really busy…. this is our policy, etc etc.

Not so long ago, I had an interaction with a so called ‘customer service representative’ from a prominent telecommunication company. The service level was so poor,  that I had informed the company I would cancel my contract if they didn’t improve. The ‘customer service representative told me he would  “hit with an ETC charge” if I did that.

Note, his choice of words,  ‘hit me with an ‘ETC charge’, why is he gonna hit me with it?  Hardly the terminology to use with a customer don’t you think?

When I asked him what an ETC was, he didn’t know, he had just read it from the textbook. Astonishing!!  Eventually he got his supervisor who found out from her supervisor that an ETC is an ‘early termination charge’.

Have you ever been to a restaurant and been patronised by the Chef who tells you your steak should be cooked virtually raw?  Try asking a French Chef you want your steak ‘well-done’ and see what sort of reaction you get? Not that I like it well-done, but I ask for it this way, because medium to a Frenchman is still a lot rarer than I care for.

I have on more than one occasion, been called an un-educated diner. Hey, I’m English, of course I am, everyone knows the English are philistines when it comes to food. Who are you to tell me it should be any other way? That is how I like my steak cooked, because it does something erotic to my taste buds, not because it satisfies the chef’s artistic flair.

I am the paying customer and for that reason, I reserve the right to have my steak cooked the way I like it, not the way the chef wants to cook it. Different maybe if the chef is knocking up an exotic creation, but a steak? Come on.

Over time I have refined my palette somewhat, and nowadays I do have a better appreciation for good food, but it has to taste great, I’m still not into poncey food.

Take a simple fried egg, which I reckon there is an art to cooking. On the one hand I like the yolk to be soft and runny. There is nothing like a Sunday morning with soft fresh egg yolk, on your toast, mingling with the bacon. On the other hand the sight of egg where the egg white is so clear you can see through to the pattern on the plate is very un-savory. Can’t think of anything more off-putting than undercooked eggs that look like someone has blown their nose on. It’s disgusting.

I know a lot of Chefs around the world would not agree with me, but I am the customer and I should be able to have my eggs fried my way, without an argument.

I once had the chef come storming out of the kitchen to angrily tell me eggs should be eaten this way, because “that is zee way to app-reeez-eeate the enhanced flava of zeee egg”.  No, I argued, I want to enjoy my breakfast not throw up over it.”

And he didn’t appreciate the offer of a lesson in frying an egg. When I asked him to give it a flip, he went off with the hump and in typical French sulky-style cremated the egg in a show of Gallic defiance.

If he was the Head Chef at Maxims in Paris, I would have understood a little more, but this was just a small little Café in Sydney serving breakfast on a Sunday morning. Thankfully the restaurants and cafés that Kelly & I frequent, do truly understand the essence of customer service, and ensure we taken care of. In this regard I would say the level of customer service in Canberra is of a pretty high standard. By the way, some of the restaurants and cafés I’m talking about Cream, Vervé, Caphs, Tosolinis and the new Urban Pantry in Manuka deserve a special mention.

Some customers want expert advise, however others know what they want and do not want to be persuaded otherwise. Above all, we as customers just want to be listened to and feel that we have been understood. We want people to step inside our minds just for a moment to realise what we are feeling.

Sometimes we don’t want the big advise, we don’t even want a solution, we just want to be heard, so please just shut up and just listen. We don’t want to hear how good this product is, we don’t want to listen to jargon and acronyms just because it makes you sound like you know what you’re talking about.

The art of customer service is having the emotional intelligence to understand the individual you are dealing with and respond to them personally, treating them the way they want to be treated.

Customer service, it is whatever the customer says it is.
You may be right, but you’re not right. Right?