When the customer is truly king

One key area of training topic that every cooperation needs these days is customer care or customer service. Often at  conferences, we sign off with the sayings: "The customer is king, treat him like one" and "The customer is always right!" There is a terrible attitude problem among the employees of various organizations. The mindset that makes us think that we are doing the customer a favor when we seek to provide optimum service to the one that puts food on our tables. We ought to bear it mind that its the customer that is doing us the service or product provider a favor.
In the modern market the customer has options. There are very few organizations that have a monopoly of goods are services these days so if we don't treat the customer right, he will go where they will treat him right! Research shows that the main reason why customers leave organizations that they have been patronizing is shoddy treatment. So how should you treat your customers? The first thing is never keep a customer of what ever status waiting to be served if you can help it. Nobody likes to be kept waiting. Second is the quality of the product or the service that you are providing: Make sure that it is at the highest level possible, where you have no control over this, present the product or service to the customer the best way possible.

Every human being has a little bit of vanity in them, so make sure that you are giving the person you are serving all your attention.Letting your attention stray, unless its totally necessary, can be fatal and be counted as rudeness. At GT Bank, Sango in Ogun State of Nigeria recently, I had the terrible experience of waiting on the queue when the computers where not working! Nobody informed the people waiting that the computers were down. It was until I noticed that most of the tellers in the bank had left their posts that I begun to ask questions and then one of the officers behind the counter began to apologize. My grouse was why wait for people to complain before you begin to give explanations? It makes the organization look very shoddy in their relations to customers. This is GT Bank a bank that prides itself as being IT savvy.

  For the past couple of months I have been speaking at workshops in Surulere and Yaba. At both locations, there are Sweet Sensation fast food outlets which we patronize for catering. Its very important to note that both outlets are in dire need of customer service training. There are have been situations inc which customers have stood idle with no one to attend to them. Even when the personnel are free. The service personnel at the outlets seem to drag their feet in the bid to answer customers. At the Surulere outlet of Sweet Sensation, on Bode Thomas, I thought perhaps I was being a little hash when I noticed this, but another customer had come in immediately after me and begun to share the same observation.
Sweet Sensation is not the only fast food restaurant that is facing challenges that come with expansion and control. Mr. Biggs has clearly experienced similar challenges and since customers have options they move around a lot till they find a place that suits their standards in taste. Every true businessman values the customer and understands the importance of having a frequent stream of customers bringing in business for the organization. My observation from a lot of organizations is that those who work in the organization, but do not necessarily own it, do not understand customer service and refuse to service the customer to the optimum level. This portends danger to businesses, especially those that have expanded beyond the immediate purveyor of the original owners. Franchises suffer a lot when they are sold outside the supervision of the original owners. The owners seeks to put systems in place to makes sure that processes of service and the taste or value of products are universal wherever the brand name is found. But the bigger the organization, the more difficult it is to maintain these standards.   Motivation and training are the only elixirs for bad customer service. Employees need to understand that the customer is king and ought to be treated like one!