More than three thousand years ago, King Solomon declared:
A good name is to be chosen over great wealth; favor is better than silver and gold. (Proverbs 22:1 CSB)
This means that reputation is more valuable than profit. Furthermore, reputation has to be earned; it cannot be bought. To earn a stellar reputation requires organizations to deliver and support excellent value propositions. This means that customer service must be a top priority.
If an organization seeks to deliver excellence, it must deliver the right value proposition and support, that is, the right customer service, which I define as follows:
Right customer service is the support needed to maximize the value proposition enjoyed by customers.
The right customer service assumes that the organization is serving the right customers by doing the right things the right ways in the right places at the right times for the right reasons. Such service places the interests of the customer before one’s own interests. Jesus expressed this idea in the following verse.
Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all. (Mark 9:35 NIV)
To be servant of all means to humbly put the interest of others ahead of oneself. Following this principle is a way to practice the Golden Rule noted above in Galatians 5:14.
Arguably one of the most celebrated companies that built its reputation on the Golden Rule was Southwest Airlines, which famously embraced the principle “customers second.” This was explained by longtime employee and senior leader Colleen Barrett in these words:
If we give great customer service to our employees as leaders, they will in turn provide it to their customers who are the passengers. And the rewards will be there for our shareholders.[i]
But perhaps the best example of the right customer service is EMC,[ii] which in the late 80s nearly went bankrupt because of a manufacturing defect in a batch of hard drives that was undetected until they were installed in customer sites. To remedy the situation required fanatical customer service. EMC offered to replace the faulty systems with either a new EMC system or one from IBM—all paid for by EMC. In addition, EMC added rigorous quality controls and made every person in the company part of customer service. Any customer could call any person in the company anytime to get support because delivering an excellent value proposition was the priority. The end result was reported by a business journal:
The company [EMC] boasts that its customer-retention rate is an astonishing 99%. When Forrester Research surveyed 50 big companies about their various technology suppliers, “EMC came out looking like God,” says Carl Howe, a director of research at Forrester. “It had the best customer-service reviews we have ever seen, in any industry.”[iii]
As a business strategy, fanatical customer service is an excellent way to practice the Golden Rule.
Here is your business tip. Wise organization leaders and managers understand that reputation is more important than profit and will, therefore, sacrifice profit to build and maintain a stellar reputation. Organizations earn reputations based on the quality of both the delivery and support of their value propositions. Customer support based on servant leadership—putting customers’ interests ahead of their own—and the Golden Rule is the Right Customer Service that will produce a stellar reputation. The reverse is also true. Failure to deliver the Right Customer Service will produce a tarnished reputation that, in time, will lead to an organization’s demise.
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i. http://www.costcoconnection.com/connection/200709?pg=19#pg19.
ii. http://www.fastcompany.com/42913/customer-service-emc-corp.
iii. Ibid.
