Every business that directly serves end-customers knows the mantras that prevail regarding the perils to the business and its bottom line if they provide lousy customer service. Those mantras include: You will lose customers; It costs “x” amount more to gain a new customer than it costs to retain a customer (the amount varies depending upon the source); It costs the business dearly in agent morale and telecom charges if customers are bounced around from agent to agent --- and the list goes on. The problem with these mantras is they are all business-centric --- how lousy customer service affects the business. As a result, assessments of the risks of providing lousy customer service are conducted. For some businesses, the thought-process is: “What is the worst-case scenario? What will be the effect of our lousy customer service on our customers anyway? Come on, really, it can’t be that bad. Customers will probably just do one of three things: defect and go to a competitor (how many of them can there be, after all, we’re the best/only choice); they’ll tell a hand-full or less of potential customers that we’re not the best business to deal with, or, if we’re lucky, they’ll simply chalk it up to ‘that’s just the way it is’ and continue to do business with us.”

Linda Driscoll-Dobel