Tip of the week: A cure for poor customer service
Customerservice in Australia is poor — and the reason it is so poor is twofold.
From the consumer’s point of view, we don’t challenge businesses to give us more than we pay for. It’s a risk to send food back in a restaurant or to complain about bad service in a shop. If you take the risk, you might get humiliated.
We learn not to challenge and complain and so bad businesses learn there is no need to do it any differently.
From the seller’s point of view, the lesson is not just the obvious one of treating your customers with respect when they do complain. What is critical is to ask yourself, or your partner or boss, “what’s in it for a customer to do business with us that has nothing to do with price?”. And tell your customers these reasons up-front because they may not ask you for fear of being humiliated.
There are great examples in the Australian marketplace of reasons to do business with different companies that have nothing to do with the price of their products or services. And you don’t have to pay for any of them.
Target tells the world about its unconditional money back guarantee; St.George Bank will save you the trouble of closing your current bank account by doing it for you if you open one with them; and Nissan offers free road service for all its new cars.
Telling your customers what they get that they don’t pay for not only shows you are concerned about their needs, it helps shift their focus away from price and onto value.
As a salesperson, it could be the difference between making sales at top dollar and constantly having to price match.
I don’t believe customer service is ever going to be perfect in this country, but, if as consumers we regularly ask the people we buy goods and services from “what’s in it for me to do business with you that has nothing to do with price?”, two things will happen.
The businesses that have a customer focus and an answer to that question will have an increasingly loyal client base and the businesses that don’t care enough about their customers to be able to answer that question will go broke. And wouldn’t that be wonderful?
Martin Grunstein is a customerservice speaker.
Recommended for you
A strong demand for core fixed income solutions has seen the Betashares Australian Composite Bond ETF surpass $1 billion in funds under management, driven by both advisers and investors.
As the end of the year approaches, two listed advice licensees have seen significant year-on-year improvement in their share price with only one firm reporting a loss since the start of 2025.
Having departed Magellan after more than 18 years, its former head of investment Gerald Stack has been appointed as chief executive of MFF Group.
With scalability becoming increasingly important for advice firms, a specialist consultant says organisational structure and strategic planning can be the biggest hurdles for those chasing growth.
