Customer Service And Loyalty

Guy Kawasaki discusses The Art of Customer Service. He offers ten tips for successful customer service. Unfortunately, all culture changes must have buy-in from the C-level executives and direct reports. And this doesn’t mean getting buy-in for earning a piece of paper that says you’re Six Sigma or CMM certified. It means living and breathing the culture… the journey, not the destination.

While reading a book about outsourcing (Smartsourcing), I’m convinced that U.S. companies need to switch from thinking about outsourcing to smartsourcing. The authors describe smartsourcing as “outsourcing 2.0.” Smartsourcing isn’t an easy read, but it’s one that all U.S. execs should read if they want to survive the changing business environment in which companies need to adapt to the environment not the other way around.

Getting off track here. Customer service. Someone who is loyal to T-Mobile lets the company get away with less-than-stellar services. But even a loyal customer can only take so much abuse. His talking about it may scare away a few potential customers. T-Mobile, in this case, violated Kawasaki’s Tip #2.

When my contract with T-Mobile ended, I closed my account and told them why (poor services and unacceptable network uptime). I’d like to move to a Treo (I use a Palm and it’d be nice to carry a Palm and data service in one device instead of a Tungsten T3 and a Sidekick) only the data service costs a bit more a month than T-Mobile’s. It might be worth paying the difference after reading his story and going through what I did.

[tags]wireless,cell phones,T-mobile,verizon,Meryl K. Evans[/tags]