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Why Customer Service is Poor

Everyone knows what makes customer service good or bad. Everyone has experience being a customer, usually fairly often. We all talk to call centres, shop assistants, and sales reps. We complain about bad service (sometimes very loudly!) and return to the businesses that we like and make us feel good. If you don’t like your doctor, accountant or mechanic, you’ll go somewhere else. As a customer, you know what you like and don’t like. There is no ‘customer training’. Customers are people. Staff are people. People deal with each other all the time! Granted, some do it better than others. So why, if people are so good at being customers, are they so bad at serving customers?

Here’s the answer: they don’t want to. Yes, everyone knows that they should smile, listen to their customer, and serve them quickly and efficiently. The customer service provider knows exactly what will happen if they do or don’t provide good service, because they have been the customer many many times. They may have undertaken customer service training. Still, poor service is rife.

There are a number of reasons that someone doesn’t want to provide exceptional service. It’s not that they want to provide bad service, just that there’s no incentive to provide good service.

Reasons to deliver poor customer service:

Reasons to deliver good customer service:

Customer service isn’t poor because people don’t have the skills. Customer service is poor because people don’t have the motivation, drive or desire to do better. This is much harder to achieve, but has much greater results. Instead of undertaking traditional customer service training, work on creating a workplace where people enjoy coming to work and want to do their best. Happy people are productive people.