What Does It Mean 'Customer Service is Everyone's Job'?

Customer service is one of the most important services that a business provides. As essential as it is to take care of your business products, it is even more critical to take care of your customers.
 

This is the reason most businesses are advised to focus on building relationships with the customer instead of just keeping an eye on the sales. In other words, it is often said that make a customer and not a sale.
 

As a business, you may have to make hard choices at times, but one thing that you can never compromise with is customer service.
 

Sam Walton correctly realized the importance of this service and said, “The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary”.
 

But then every business would think that it is just the sales representative who has to take care of the customer service. However, the case is not so. Every business has employees at all levels, and the employees treat the customers in more or less the same way that they are treated.
 

So, the characteristic of a good business is to treat their employees right from the moment that they are hired as their first customers. If such an instinct is passed onto the employees they will pass on the same level of expression to the customers that they deal with.
 

After all, it takes just one employee having a bad day to ruin a customer’s experience and leave them with a bad reputation of the company. And surely nobody wants that!
 

So, you might have got a picture of how every employee working in an organization has some contribution towards shaping the experience of a customer. Happy employees in an organization are most likely to represent the brand in a positive manner.
 

And we are having this discussion today because a company’s reputation does not build up on its own. It is a result of small contributions and dedication of each of its happy employees.
 

Illustrating this fact Laurie McIntosh has correctly said that, “You are serving a customer, not a life sentence. Learn how to enjoy your work.” 
 

Statistics also reveal that the top 20 percent of the loyal customers of an organization are solitarily responsible for driving 80 percent of the company’s revenue.
 

Now, you see why is it important to keep a healthy relationship with your customers and not just move on by making sales. This also leads to a conclusion that the job of a salesperson is not finished once a deal has been closed.
 

Once you sign the deal with a customer, it becomes even more important to make sure that they are being delivered what was promised in your deal and product. And this is how you make the top 20 percent of loyal customers for your company.
 

Everyone working in a company needs to be informed of what the customers want and play a role in the delivering those ethical and materialistic values to the customer. While ethical values attribute to working with a positive and jolly attitude, materialistic values refer to delivering the right kind of product and not keeping the customer in any false beliefs.
 

According to Bill Gates, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Therefore, every company must put their best efforts at each level to achieve a higher customer satisfaction level.
 

Customer service is everyone’s job in a business. Right from the product development team to the sales and marketing team, everyone must be dedicated to contributing to build a good customer experience.
 

Consider, for example, unless the product development team does not understand the requirements and needs of the customer, they cannot build a product that will fit the customer’s needs and life easily.
 

Similarly, if the sales rep does not listen to the customer they will fail to present to them, the right product as per the customer’s need.  The same goes on to the marketing team that contributes to the customer service by presenting the right and authentic information to the customers about their products through different media platforms.
 

In the words of Damon Richards, “Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”  
 

As a leader, if you want all the people working with your company to demonstrate the vital rationale of customer service and not just your sales representing team, then it must be accepted as everyone’s responsibility and not just the responsibility of the front running team of your company.
 

Therefore, it becomes essential to ensure that everyone working in a company must understand the basics of customer service, what it actually looks like and how it is correctly practiced.
 

So, different teams working in a business whether external or internal must realize their own freedom to go ahead and do what is right for the customer instead of being stuck in the endless dilemma of business politics.
 

The customer service culture has to be built in a company, also by hiring the right kind of people that work hard in keeping up a good customer rapport. Often as customers we have heard many employees or representatives saying that ‘it is not my job’, or ‘I am not the right person to answer this’, “We don’t deal with that in this department” etc, or in other cases the body language says it all and the customer gets a picture that the representative is not taking appropriate interest.
 

These are all cases where the responsibility is being avoided and certainly not sustainable for a company that wants to build a good customer service.
 

Thus, customer service must not be thought as any one person’s job or responsibility. It is a collective effort of all the people working in a company and requires proper customer etiquette to be followed.
 

Always remember to welcome customers, whether or not it’s your job to do so and try to volunteer to support teammates if they’re short-handed.
 

As Donald Porter has correctly said, “Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong”.
 

So, go ahead and do the right thing for your customer even if it demands travelling an extra mile.