Sell someone a house or a car or even their weekly groceries and you’re selling them not only goods and services but also a very big promise.
You’re undertaking to provide them with things that work and are in good condition.
Customer service professionals know honouring this promise makes a huge difference to the reputation of their organisation.
This is true whether that organisation is a luxury hotel hosting a wedding or a local authority arranging bin collections.
On top of this, every customer you come into contact within the course of your day will have their own demands that also need to be met.
Most of the time it all comes together. Even when everything seems stacked against you, if you really have a talent for customer service, you’ll be able to think your way around all of the problems to ensure a good result.
Someone who knew how to keep everyone happy was polar explorer Ernest Shackleton. In order to finance his trip to the South Pole he had to negotiate deals with newspapers hungry for publicity and with industrialist James Caird, whose money kept the entire expedition afloat.
So when his ship was trapped by ice and eventually sank things looked grim. Shackleton, however, did not give up.
He and his team may have failed to traverse the frozen continent but in every other way possible they gave their clients value for money.
The explorers spent two years on the ice, eventually making their way to a remote island from where Shackleton and a small crew sailed in an open lifeboat over 600 miles of wild ocean to the whaling station on South Georgia.
Despite the perils of freezing temperatures and cracks that opened up in the ice beneath them as they slept, Shackleton lost not one crew member and brought everyone back alive, to huge public acclaim.
It’s a story of endurance that has gone down in history as a tale of true heroism.
It’s also an example that’s still used to teach leadership in elite organisations and is a perfect example of how to keep a customer services team intact and working together to ensure customers get what they want.
The number one lesson? Never leave a customer feeling they’ve been left out in the cold!
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