The Reluctant Entrepreneur: Turning Dreams into Profits

SET HIGH STANDARDS FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE—AND MAKE SURE THEY STAY HIGH

It’s a fact of life that customer service will slowly but surely go to pot if it is not monitored.

Set, for example, a two-ring standard for answering the phone. Spend a week or two working with your people to get them up to, say, a 90 percent compliance rate. Then leave them alone for a year. What will you see when you check back with them? The phone will be ringing, on the average, three or four times and the number of dropped calls will have skyrocketed.

I’ve had this experience with many companies I’ve consulted with. AP, for example, hired me to improve marketing and increase sales. But since the company had a reputation for lousy customer service, one of the first things I did was call the customer service line, pretending to be a customer. It was a disaster. The phone rang eight times before being picked up. Then I was put on hold. Mind you, this was an $8 million company. I knew it would be impossible for me to help AP grow the business unless we fixed it. It would be like trying to bail out a leaking boat.

So I went in and revamped the customer service process. This involved replacing staff, introducing a training program, and implementing a reporting system. I hired a manager to continue what I had put in place, and I got on with the business of sales and marketing.

A few years later, I heard that AP’s customer service was once again “a joke.” I was shocked. And when I checked into it, I was floored. ...