Why is perception such an important part of customer service?

“Some say you ain’t cool unless you gotz a AI chatbot…”

This post was based on a question I recently answered on Quora.

“What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes…”

And over the time that I’ve been doing this, one thing has become VERY clear to me…

A lot of the information out there is (to quote Swordfish again) pure, unremarkable shit.

The problem, one of many, is complexity.

Customer service is simple, but conventional customer service people get paid to complicate it.

One of the things they love to do is trying to figure out how to measure and improve customer satisfaction.

And it’s something I get asked about a lot.

I’ll skip measuring satisfaction for now. The question of how to increase it is much more interesting, whether you measure it or not.

But first, let’s define it.

What is “good customer service”?

What is “customer satisfaction”?

It’s when your customer perceives that he’s receiving good service.

Maybe he never consciously thinks about it. Maybe he just buys your product, uses it, enjoys it, benefits from it, and never has a reason to ever speak to your customer service team.

In the conventional customer service world, this guy is NOT a satisfied customer.

He’s a bit of a mystery to those who like to over-complicate things.

“Let’s send him a 400 question survey and have him rate various aspects of our business and product and customer service effectiveness!” they scream.

They develop PowerPoint slides with strategies and have meetings.

Maybe they email him a survey. Maybe someone calls him at home. The more intrusive ones bother him with popups every time he logs into the service.

“TELL US HOW WE’RE DOING!”

These needy conventional customer service people won’t leave this poor guy alone until they get DATA.

But all this shit is super annoying.

And they’re missing an obvious and super important point.

The most satisfied customer is often the one your customer service team has NEVER spoken to.

In fact, people ONLY talk to customer service when they are dissatisfied with something you did.

In other words, if a customer contacts your customer service team, you fucked up.

I’ve talked about this before. And it’s not an absolute. There are always one off situations. But in general, they are contacting you because they are NOT satisfied.

Conventional customer service people (not really leaders, I’ll just call them people…) focus on making customers happy once they contact the business.

They focus on ways to measure how happy the customer is after they finish with him, and how miserable he was before.

But they’re only dealing with the least satisfied, most miserable subset of customers.

Comcast is widely known for having terrible service. I had an experience this morning that reminded me how true that statement is.

But before that, before I noticed that they raised my bill again without telling me, I probably would have told you their service was excellent.

Why?

Because I never had to deal with them. I paid money every month, and fast, reliable internet access continued to be delivered to my apartment.

Despite their terrible customer service when you actually talk to them, they were providing me amazing service by not doing anything that required me to talk to them.

In other words, it came down to perception.

The worst customer service in the world seems amazing if you never have to deal with them.

Similarly, people love to debate what the best media of customer service is.

Some say you ain’t cool unless you gotz a AI chatbot!

Some very large businesses run their whole customer service team through a simple email app and a couple Filipinos.

Which is better?

The one that customers perceive as better.

Getting an email back from a nice lady in the Philippines a day or 2 later that accurately and politely resolves your issue is much better than spending all day chatting back and forth with a robot and trying to get it to understand some basic thing.

The email isn’t instant. People tell you to be available 24/7 and respond immediately.

And it’s low tech. Silicon Valley tells us that MOR TECH is the solution to every problem, especially the ones we didn’t even know existed until we encountered their marketing.

But customer perception is what matters.

And that’s why an inexpensive foreign worker can often provide the perception of better service than a HUGE department with rules, meetings, PowerPoint, monitoring, measurement, AI CHATBOTZ(!), and whatever else certain people may tell you is “essential” to customer service.

If your customer service is perceived as good, then it is.

And if your customer service is never perceived at all, because there are no problems your customers need resolved, even better.

This answer has gone on long enough, but I hope I’ve made my point. What your customers perceive about the quality of your service IS the level of your service.

And the best service you can provide is never giving them a reason to have to deal with you in the first place.