Defining Good Or Bad Service

I have received questions from friends on what is good or bad service. A willing smile? A wide variety of products offered? Being able to answer all your queries?

Everyone has his or her threshold for what makes service good or bad. However, some underlying truths remain.

Service is about people, dealing with other people. It is about an experience for you, the customer.

Can we really learn good customer service or how to serve people better? We can probably learn the technical aspects but some things, we need to have a genuine love for. The genuine love for people is a core trait that is often lacking in many in the service industry. As I once overheard, "In service, you need to have a big heart." This translates to having a love for the people you serve.

How many times have we had a bad service experience because providers do not listen, or are too eager to get their point across to you, based on legalities or terms and conditions before first listening to what your problem is?

So, what really constitutes good service? It is the willingness of service providers to listen, do what they can to act on the problem and work to provide a solution for you. Tall order yes? Who ever said being in customer service was an easy job?

On the other hand, us customers have to be reasonable. We should communicate our needs clearly and more importantly, be reasonable. We cannot expect to pay ridiculously low sums and still expect service providers to bend over backwards for us all the time. People still need to make a living and companies need to make a profit to stay in business.

No point listening and then not acting or when one acts on it, one often gets it wrong. That is, if you ask me, bad service. It is just like a restaurant which has the widest variety of wines available yet their waiters keep sending you the wrong bottle, recommending a wine which does not go well with your food, or worse, recommending the most expensive wines just to increase their sales figures. I would much rather go to a restaurant which may not have a wide variety of wine, but the waiters observe and pay attention to my order, offers suitable alternatives if my choice of wine is unavailable and gets my order right.

This willingness to listen, act on it and pay attention to your customers is what makes service good and the experience memorable in the right way.

I am not a customer service specialist. The above is my opinion, as a consumer, on what makes a service experience a good or bad one for me.

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