Before Telling Others To Improve Their Customer Service, Improve Yours First!

One of my biggest fears as a customer service professional and a blogger is that we would spend all of this time talking about customer service and telling companies how to provide awesome customer service without actually affecting any positive improvement in the customer service at Phone.com.  I was reminded of this recently when one of my Twitter followers, who is also a customer of ours, tweeted just that:

Prior to helping others improve their customer service, you might first want to improve yours.

Wow, what a shot in the arm?  How do you react when this happens to you?  Here’s how I propose you deal with it and how I approached this situation:

1. Listen and seek to understand- Rather than reacting or immediately defending yourself and your company, seek to understand the situation and you may very well learn something.

2. Improve based on the feedback- In almost all of the cases, there are nuggets of truth so find those and improve.  Again, defensiveness only leads to missing out on great learning opportunities.

3. Review your core values- Especially in the context of this blog I am reminded that more than telling other companies how to improve their customer service, our goal is to make ours AWESOME.  It’s important to highlight both when we do well but also be humble enough to admit where we fell short.

4. Appreciate the accountability- I am a firm believer that everyone needs accountability.  Everyone needs someone in their life that is willing to point out where they are not awesome.  As we gain followers on our blog I am grateful to anyone who reminds us to practice what we preach.

While it’s never easy, my response to a shot in the arm such as this is THANK YOU!  We needed that and we will improve.

[custom_author=admin]