Did you know that it is International Customer Services week - 5-9th October 2009? Neither did I until yesterday, when I arrived on a client site to see that they had totally embraced the whole idea of customer services being promoted across the business during the week. It made me think again about how we know what our customers actually want our service to be. Without continually asking them (I know how frustrating that can be as a customer) we often have to 'second guess' what our customers actually want an we may be getting it wrong. An example of how we may do this was demonstrated to me at the weekend when my hubby took me to an Internationally acclaimed restaurant for lunch for my birthday and we expected that the service would be 'fawning and subservient' which, although not what we prefer, was probably expected by most who dine there. What actually happened was that the staff very quickly got a handle on how we wanted to be treated and did just that. They treated others differently - in fact giving all of us the customer experience we wanted instead of the 'one service fits all' approach. My mission now is to ensure that we treat all of our customers to the service they want rather than the one we think they want.
