Practicing good customer service goes a long way in helping you develop your inter-personal skills with potential customers, co-workers, and supervisors, and potential employers.

Simply put, Practicing Good Customer Service is showing others that you care about the job you do and care about how well you do it.

Whether most people realize it or not, all employees are representatives of their companies. How well they perform their jobs and how they interact with the public can greatly affect people’s perception of the organization where they work.

For example, for years I drove to Birmingham daily to work via I-20. For a while I saw a vehicle from a company that transports needy children to the necessary healthcare in Birmingham. This company’s website talks about their mission and and how they got started. They sound like a very good organization performing a service that helps others. However, for several weeks, my perception of this company was not so good. For a few weeks, my only information of this company was of a reckless driver who dangerously exceeded the speed limit by weaving in and out of traffic and cutting off several vehicles including 18 wheelers and my car on several occasions. I knew nothing of this company other than how a particular driver behaved in his company’s car (with the company’s logo plastered all over the car). I am pretty sure that this driver probably thought he was a customer service representative to the people in the car, and never thought he had to worry about being a representative to others on I-20. However, his actions in a company vehicle were the basis of what the general public between Oxford and Birmingham saw on a regular basis. His actions did not make the company, KidsOne Transport, look good. I am sure that this was probably just one particularly one bad driver, but since he was the only one I ever saw, he was the only representative of that company I ever saw. KidsOne is a non-profit organization that operates by receiving donations. How many people who were cut off along I-20 by the above driver would likely donate funds to this company?

Below are examples of Bad Customer Service.

Here is a collection of customer service issues / problems that people had posted to an online forum discussing their customer service horror stories. Read through this examples and answer the questions on the Assignment Link.

1	The story: I was trying to get some information from the local cable company, Comcast, about my bill. I couldn’t understand the different groupings of channels which had no explanation just names like Extended Package. She couldn’t explain it and kept getting the same channels in different groupings. I said, very politely, “I don’t understand your explanation, is there someone else who can explain it to me so I will understand it.” She replied: “You’re stupid.” Then she hung up.
2	Can you believe this interaction? Here’s the story: In our large grocery store, I asked about the cinnamon buns that were in the sample dome. The employee I asked said that they were very fattening and I could do with losing some weight!
3	I explained to a DELL rep that I had 12 new laptops that would not power on no matter what I did. His answer to me was “What do you want me to do about it?” I said excuse me? He clarified by saying “if they don’t power on I can’t trouble shoot them and if they aren’t powering on it has to be something you did to them that made them not work.” I still have nightmares.
4	“You will have to go online to and fix this.” I replied “Seriously? I am talking to customer service – a real live human being and you can’t do a thing for me? “Yes ma’am, you need to go online to do this.” So I asked her, “What, exactly, do you do?” Silence.
5	Here’s the story: My father passed away. I called a credit card company to cancel his account. I said, “My name is Debra. My father Pat passed away and I am the Executor of the Estate. I am calling to cancel his account.” The CSR replied, “Well, I need to talk to Pat.” I said, “Listen very carefully. He’s DEAD – now if you want to talk to him, you’ll have to figure out how to. GIVE ME YOUR SUPERVISOR!” The Supervisor got on the phone and I said, “Do you have a connection with God?” She cracked up laughing – she had heard about the conversation.
6	I had spent well over 3 hours on the phone with customer service/tech. support, having been repeatedly put on hold, transferred, and disconnected. I called back after yet another disconnection after being on hold for several minutes. The person who answered started to go into their script, asking me for irrelevant information. I told the person that I just needed to be connected to XYZ because I had been disconnected after being on the phone with them for over three hours. The CSR went to a very long speech about how he’d be happy to transfer me. I didn’t need a speech. I just needed him to transfer me. I told him this. He repeated the speech. His scripted, inhuman “courteousness” just made me angry and hate the company.
7	Bad Brakes = Bad Service: Along the lines of more automotive troubles, I had to get new brakes installed in my car and the dealer quoted me a price of $250.00, which seemed reasonable compared to other quotes I received in the ballpark of $700.00. Shortly after arriving at home the dealer called me and told me the real price would be $500.00. When I asked why the price doubled, I was told that the original quote was only for the front brakes. What a bad way to provide a cost estimate: low ball upfront and then spring the real price on the customer once the car is apart and in the shop.