Customer Service

We are still enduring the aftermath of a serious recession and it will be months, more likely years, before the economy is back to normal. Companies, therefore, should be competing hard - both on price and service - to attract as much business as possible.

Some do but many do not.

There are too many companies that have forgotten - or never learned - how to pronounce the words CUSTOMER and SERVICE. They also seem to have forgotten that there are other suppliers and, in a time when frugality is becoming cool again, the option to do without is real.

Although not widely regarded as a management thinker, Mahatma Gandhi understood the real relationship between a business and its customers:

"Who is a customer? The customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption of our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our building, he is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so."

Those are simple thoughts but many business failures can be linked to neglected or ill treated customers. Sometimes the issue is incompetence and lack of interest on the part of the company's employees. More often, however, the culprit is fixation on routine together with resistance to any deviation from established process and procedure.

Because employee judgement is far from perfect, it is inevitable that companies, which trust their employees to do the right thing, will incur losses. The gains, however, so greatly outweigh the losses that any other course of action can only be based on a misunderstanding of the real world.

Acting in accordance with the old adage 'doing well by doing good' actually works. What more needs to be said?