There are many books, articles and blog posts about improving Customer Service. For example, a Google search for “Improve Customer Service” results in over 1 million hits….easy to see that there are plenty of people interested in customer service improvements. It seems that a great deal of the results from the above Google search are links to organizations wishing to help you improve service within your organization. In addition to consulting companies trying to market their services to help you improve your customer service, there are many other people writing articles and blog posts trying to tell you what steps to take to improve services….and with this post, I plan to add one more page to those search results. 
For five years I worked within the customer services group of a fairly large company. The group was responsible for technical support, training, implementation, project management and small programming projects. During this time, I read quite a few books on improving customer service but I was usually underwhelmed by what these books had to say. Looking through the results of the google search above, I realize that I’m still underwhelmed by most of what I found.
A few of the better articles and blog postings about the topic are found below.
- Joel Spolsky understands Customer Service. Read what he has to say in his post titled “Seven steps to remarkable customer service“
- Kevin Eikenberry gets it too. Read his post titled “Customer Service Made Simple“
- Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba understand Customer Service. Read anything that they have written.
- Mike Schaffner at Beyond Blinking Lights and Acronyms has quite a few posts about Customer Service but one of my favorites is Creating Customer Loyalty.
Closing thoughts:
Customer Service within any organization should have one goal: Service the customer in a way that provides value to the customer and to the organization. By creating value for your clients through your customer service, you are creating fans (and hopefully ‘evangelists‘).
[tags] Customer Service, Customer Evangelists, Improve Service [/tags]
