What is Customer Service?

Welcome to the CXMatters Podcast my name is Justin Tippett CEO of ACXPA and also host of this podcast and in this episode I’m getting to talk to the world famous Jaquie Scammell welcome Jaquie thank you Justin thanks for having me wonderful to have you on the show in this episode where we are going to talk about well customer service and a definition I guess because we’ve probably all got our own interpretation of what that means and I thought you know what who better to ask than someone who does this stuff for a living in is also on The Advisory Board of ACXPA so I’m going to throw the questions straight to you Jackie what is customer service well it’s yeah and and customer service sometimes gets muddled in that CX customer experience and and I think it’s a great place to start so for me I like to keep things really simple customer service is simply making people feel better than when you found them and that’s the whole aim of customer service what do we need to do to make that person who’s buying our product or service feel a little bit better than when they first arrived and it’s it’s one of the most wonderful Parts about customer service that I love because that’s the human touch the human impact that we can all have there is a of course an academic definition of customer service and one that I um I certainly read many years ago and thought you know that’s probably helpful to remember so it was um back in the 1980s an academic by the name of Klaus he said there’s three elements that make up a quality customer service the first is Task the second is the tangible and the third is the treatment and so the task is the the transaction the the process that you’re going through to give that customer the product or service the tangible is the stuff sometimes it can be the um technology that we’re using or it could be literally a physical space if you’re working in a bricks and mortar environment so the environment that you’re working in and then the treatment of course is the emotional and social component of service and that’s the part that I love the most because that’s the feeling aspect of service which is how customers measure up on how they feel when they’re being delivered a service from you yeah and that passion certainly comes through your face lights up where your voice lights up when you talk about that tangible so I’m going to throw the other T’s to the side for this particular one because there’s lots of podcasts that we’ll have that talk about technology and the enablers ETC so if we focus on the tangible and the feeling part how do organizations get that right because I guess if it was perfect we’d all be doing it and we’re not so uh so what are some of the tips that we can give to people out there that are listening or watching yeah so the so the treatment element of customer service is really about um like I said the emotional social interaction that you’re having with another human being and I mean you know yourself the way you feel when you’re being treated by someone usually um it’s very subjective it’s very personal it’s very unique so what are the things that make up the way you treat people well first we start with mindsets so anyone in any type of service role we all bring a certain level of thinking and mindsets attitudes beliefs sometimes stories to work and often that leaks out in our behavior and in our language and the way people experience us the way we treat people so one of the first places we always start when we look at improving the treatment of a quality service experiences mindsets and then that enables us to then be aware of how we actually behave how we speak how we act women with customers whether it’s on the phone or face to face so yeah mindsets habits language behavior these are all the the soft skills and the elements of treatment that determines how you make a customer feel when they interact with you regardless of the outcome whether you solve the problem or got them the solution you’re always going to leave someone with a feeling yeah yeah and that treatment stuff is is so important because as you’ve touched on I mean it for a lot of customer service folk they’re dealing with a lot of people in a day right and it’s pretty hard to just sort of front up customer customer after that customer uh and particularly if one’s sort of thrown you very early in the day it can really Offset you know the whole rest of the day so we’ll cover mindset and stuff in in other episodes but I I guess I really love that bit around how you make people feel and that that treatment part of customer service so well we’ve given people some three T’s we’ve given people a formal definition as well so if that’s what you tuned into when you saw the podcast of the title I hope we’ve given you the answer um we do have other podcasts with Jaquie as well to listen to and if you haven’t already make sure you listen to the podcast where we actually delve into Jaquie’s uh life in uh this is your life kind of stuff because it’s a fascinating Journey uh and I I genuinely encourage people to to listen because you you realize just where some of the the skills and experience that Jaquie’s had and how that actually manifests itself now and why she’s the expert that she is so if you haven’t tuned into that make sure you do but for now thank you so much Jaquie for your time on this one and we look forward to catching everyone on the next podcast of the CX matters podcast bye for now