Charles Dickens famously wrote: Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. His point was this: it’s not the absolute level of income that makes you happy or miserable; it’s the gap between what you have, and what you feel you need.
Customer service is the same: it’s not the absolute level of customer service that makes your customers love you or hate you: it’s the gap between what your customers expect, and what you provide.
My broadband has been rather slow lately, so this morning at9amI called my internet service provider BT, to ask them to sort it out. Frankly, I was expecting a long and tedious phone call, lots of transfers from one department to another and not much progress today with my problem. To my amazement, the first person I spoke to did some speed tests there and then, told me he couldn’t sort it, and arranged a time for an engineer to visit me later on today. Result (so far!): a very happy customer.
By contrast, a few days ago I tried to book some tickets on the East Coast train website. After a frustrating 20 minutes trying to get the website to work, I phoned the (premium rate) helpline. After quite a lot of fafffing around, I was told that the website temporarily didn’t work for the type of transaction I was trying to make. Also, they didn’t know how long it would take to fix. My expectation of a train ticket website is that you can use it to buy tickets. Result: misery and anger.
But here’s the problem: customer expectations are rising all the time. A few years ago I didn’t expect to be able to buy train tickets online at all. Now I do. In fact, thanks to ticketless air travel, I really expect to be able to download them onto my iPhone, rather than collecting paper tickets from the station, but East Coast doesn’t allow me to do that; perhaps I’ll find another provider who does…
What do your customers expect? What do you need to do to meet those expectations – even if they seem unreasonable to you?
And here’s that Dickens quote in full: