How important is customer service to the decisions you make when buying products and services? Will you go to a business you don’t like in order to save money or because it’s convenient to do so? Will you go farther than you have to or pay more money for something just because you want to support the business or the owner of the business? When buying something, what’s more important – saving money or having a better “experience” while making the purchase?
My answer to the first question is that customer service is very important to me. Maybe the importance I place on customer service is a function of my advanced age. Whatever the reason (with all things being equal), better customer service will always get my business. Notwithstanding age, I assume most people feel the same way and desire to be treated well when giving someone their money.
If I’m correct, and everyone feels the same, why do many businesses perform badly in the area of customer service? There can be no question that the failure to provide good customer service is a root cause of many business failures. If people don’t like doing business with you, they’ll look elsewhere for the same product or service. When business goes elsewhere, your cash flow drops, which is when you face the biggest enemy of most businesses – lack of money.
In life, we’re all like little businesses. What kind of “customer service” do you give to the people with whom you come in contact on a day-to-day basis? Does contact with you make people want to come back and spend time (their most valuable commodity) with you, or do they spend time with you only when they have to or when it benefits them? We can’t always control the way people feel, but we can sure be a lot nicer to be around based on our attitude and the way we treat others.
There are those who believe the relationships we have with our fellow human beings are the true key to determining whether or not we’re happy. Some people believe they’re the center of the universe and the only thing that matters. By definition, those people are emotionally alone, and the world in which they live is one dimensional. We all know and probably care about people that seem to live in that kind of world.
Assuming most of us realize the benefit of personal relationships, why is it that we don’t always act accordingly? In the same way the business owner “knows” how important customer service is to his business and ignores it in order to maximize profit, individuals might sacrifice personal relationships for short-term gain. They ignore the long term costs to their happiness from the relationships they have injured or gone without. The effect of a lack of customer service might take a long time to be recognized by a business owner in the same way that the harm caused by the ignoring of personal relationships can go unnoticed until it is too late.
Go out and sell yourself today. The best way to get what you want is to get others what they want. Nobody has too many friends. Think of relationships in the same way you might think of cash flow. There can never be too much of a good thing. That is true for everyone, especially those of us way up in the CHEAP SEATS!
Bill James is a co-founder of the James Law Firm with offices in Little Rock, Conway and Fayetteville, Arkansas. His primary area of practice is criminal defense. He can be contacted at Bill@JamesFirm.com