Seth Godin recently authored an insightful post on his Blog…

“Customer service is difficult, expensive and unpredictable. But it’s a mistake to assume that any particular example is automatically either good or bad. A company might spend almost nothing on customer service but still succeed in reaching its goals.

Customer service succeeds when it accomplishes what the organization sets out to accomplish.”

Seth goes on to articulate many uses of Customer Service, including:

• To create a significant competitive advantage by engaging with customers in a way that others can’t or won’t.
• To streamline the delivery of inexpensive goods produced in an industrial way.
• To lower expectations and satisfy customers by giving them exactly what you promised, which is not much.
• To raise expectations and delight customers by giving them way more than they hoped for, which was a lot.
• To dance with customers in an act of co-creation.
• To diminish negative word of mouth.
• To build extraordinary trust.
• To treat different people differently.
• To race with competitors to lower customer service costs just a bit more than they will.
• Because you can.

Every single person who makes budget decisions, staffing decisions and customer service decisions must to be clear about which strategy you picked, needs to be able to state, “we’re doing this because it’s congruent with what we say customer service is for.”

See Seth’s full post here.