Over the last decade, I’ve watched the business world go very polar in the extremes of customer service. Every time I talk to fellow business owners at any form of networking or subsequent 1-1, the one resounding point is service. Something which the small business world seems to have caught a massive leap over the big box shifting internet sheds.

The simple phrase people like people is at the heart of the small business, we trade with people we like, equally with people of similar values. People understand each other and flex accordingly to meet each other desires. Even Maslow touches upon this in his hierarchy of needs. So the un-educated who drive their transactions only on simplistic reasoning of price, miss the core premises of the underlying intrinsic premise of support, service and satisfaction – I struggle to find an online example which does this truly well.

One point which truly shocked me, was when a professional service provider, a one-man band, said, I need your documents uploading to the portal. This word, portal defines to me bad customer experience, you’re just another number, ticket, automated action, all of which are synonymous with big we don’t value you, internet online businesses.

Go back to my grandparents, they experienced great customer service, and they felt that their hard-earned money was appreciated in their local communities. What makes me say this, they knew their butcher, who would advise and treat them as individuals, they would go in the Co-op and they would be known, their “divvy” would bring them back to spend again as they had a relationship / tie with the organisation/business.

Even if I look back a few decades, in the print business, we had substantially more tied/committed business, purely down to the management of relationships. Interestingly we won business recently, producing a calendar, purely on the ground of how we handled the enquiry, provided answers, questioned their needs. All of this is not an online process-driven, but an individual pathway, from experience and a desire to deliver. The customer said he was put off by the levels of automation. 

The larger the business the greater the need for automation, which is great, but it strips away service and added value that brilliant staff often provided. After all, Richard Branson is renowned for using the phrase look after your staff and they will look after your customers. Which is bang on true. However, we are talking about individuals here, and unfortunately not clone-able. I’ve seen it in many medium-large businesses, who say everyone is replaceable, however, some people require multiple people to step into special shoes of skilled practitioners of customer service.

Capping it off, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. 2020 has shown us that service and support do drive good business, perhaps if you believe in a better pedigree of service, you know where to go.