The Key to Great Customer Service: Empowering Your Staff

“The customer is always right.” We expect our employees to bend over backwards for our customers, subjugating themselves to every whim of the man with the money who walked through our doors. “The customer is always right” isn’t just a century-old philosophy, but the gospel. We either cater to the person holding the check, or we lose the sale. It’s an idea set in stone, an undisputed rule of business.

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The problem, though, is that the customer isn’t always right. Some customers behave like spoiled children, taking advantage of your policies and treating your employees like dirt, abusing them as they see fit with the full knowledge that you won’t do anything about it. They expect you to accept returns on products purchased elsewhere and damaged through their neglect after months of abuse. After all, they’re the customer. They must be right. Right?

Wrong. Great customer service means happy customers, the kind who remain loyal to your company for their entire lives and demand that every person they know patronize your business. They’re your best advocates, giving your company the word-of-mouth advertising and buzz you couldn’t buy with a thousand Super Bowl ads. But happy customers don’t just materialize out of thin air because you threw a plaque on the wall letting every one of them that they’re always right and that you’ll do everything in your power to prove it. Happy customers are made by happy employees.

So how do you get happy employees, the kind would willingly bend over backwards to help a customer? While there might not be a nice, clean clich to handle that situation, there is an easy way: empower them. Give your employees the power to take care of the customer and they’ll go out of their way to do exactly that. If your employees have to track down a manager any time they want to do what everyone involved knows is right the right thing to do, your company’s customer service will never be anything more than mediocre.

Of course, empowering your employees means giving up some of your control and actually trusting the people you pay to be the face of your business, an idea that many business owners despise. It also means instilling a sense of pride and ownership in the company in those same people, and those factors go a long way toward making them want to go that extra mile when it comes to serving the customers.

Southwest Airlines has an excellent reputation for customer service. Look at any case study or article on the subject written in the last twenty year