We Won A Customer Service Award…So What
I’m sitting here in my hotel room in New Jersey, approximately 2,500 miles from home with a five pound glass trophy staring me in the face. We are just three hours removed from winning a Best Practice In Customer Service award from the New York Enterprise Report Awards representing the Customer Service team at Phone.com. The list of people to credit for this award is extremely long and we are truly humbled to have received it.
All of that being said, it’s still just an award and if we can’t consistently back it up with awesome customer service it really is just a shallow accolade. So bear with me as I make a few notes to self in response:
- A blog is just a blog unless the words on that blog are affecting real change. I am reminded that our purpose of this blog is NOT to win awards but to do so much more. We want to learn what it means to provide awesome customer service and put that into practice at Phone.com. We want to enrich the lives of any and all customer service professionals and people who come in contact with our blog. We truly want to make the world a better place by. impacting the customer service community for good.
- No one person wins a customer service award. If our entire customer service team quit tomorrow, I would quickly realize that I nor any of our executives at Phone.com could win a customer service award. Customer service can only be successful if the entire company from top to bottom realizes that they are all in the business of customer service. I am tremendously grateful to our team on the front lines. We have a group of people who truly have the gift of making our customers feel valued and it is humbling to work with such a group.
- I’m tired. Hey I can be a little selfish right? I just made my first trip to New York for this awards ceremony. The busy-ness of New York coupled with networking events have this introvert exhausted. I am much more comfortable working closely with our customers and our customer service team and really do look forward getting back to business as usual.
- We’re just getting started. As Jenny and I have said many times, we cannot believe that starting a blog to learn about customer service could propel us toward awesomeness in customer service, but it certainly has helped. Guess what? We still have customers that get angry and cancel their service. We have others that complain because we missed an important detail on their account. As long as those exist we can always improve. That is where we will focus.
Thank you for reading my moment of introspection. I am reminded that I truly am proud to be a customer service professional and proud to work for a company that values its customers. If we receive more awards because of our customer service, great! Don’t think for a second that I believe that is the end goal!
[custom_author=admin]
Well said, Jeremy!
I went home last night and was thinking about everything customer service–every person I’ve worked with in the past, ever person who has trained me, every person I’ve learned from and everyone I work with now…and how everything adds up to make you who you are today…this isn’t an easy job. There are days in which we all want to throw our computers out the window and punch something, but we still do this because it’s our job and we ultimately care about our customers because they are people too. This award is for our entire company, every single person who works their patootie off to make the service work and for our customers, who we wouldn’t even have the opportunity to be nominated for the award, without them.