Tag: personal (page 14 of 14)

Customer Service

Apathy

People want to get the most out of what they pay for. Companies and entire economies rise and fall based on customer confidence and loyalty. If a customer sees a solid, dependable product that delivers on its promises, they’ll use it continually and recommend it to others. Pretty simple concept, right?

Say your company manufactures widgets. If the widgets develop problems in the course of manufacture, most responsible companies will assume responsibility for the problems and get them fixed. After they leave the widget factory, however, it’s down to the customer not to abuse them. If you cram your widget between two sprockets the widget wasn’t designed to interact with, you’re going to have problems and you’ll call the manufacturer. This is where customer service comes into play.

You need to be able to understand the position your customer has found themselves in. That means letting them talk, rant, yell, even curse if necessary. Better to remind them that profanity won’t solve their problem than simply to hang up. You also can’t put a time limit on a customer service call. I worked for a company that did that, and it severely diminished the quality of the service delivered. The technicians on the phone were clearly more concerned about a quick, easy answer that ended the call before the cut-off time than they were discovering the root of the problem and solving it entirely, which would prevent future, more exasperated calls. But company policies are company policies, no matter how wrong they might seem, and when you go against them, you risk your job. I tried to stand up for my principles rather than kowtowing to an unrealistic expectation, and unsurprisingly I was fired for it.

It seems to me that a balance should be struck between the value of one’s employees, the quality of one’s product, and the experience of the customer. If you set out to hire good people, you’ll want to keep them happy in order to retain their services. If you have a product in mind with the intent to make it better than the competition’s offering, you should have the courage to stand behind it. When a customer comes to you with a request, they will respect you if you work with them to make their vision fit your product.

If you instead make your product fit their vision, all you’re really doing is bending over for them. You can only bend so far before something breaks. If you sacrifice the qualities of your products that make them unique, and instead do the same thing as everybody else out there, you won’t stand out, and your product will eventually be lost in the herd of bleating sheep that is the industry of your choice. Letting the customer bend you over and allowing your product to become someone else’s plaything isn’t very fair to your employees, either, and if you’re not taking care of them with things like competitive salaries and decent benefits, you will lose them.

Without good employees, the quality of your products will suffer. When the quality of your products suffer, your customers will be unsatisfied. Unsatisfied customers look for other places to spend their money. It certainly seems like a straightforward chain of causes and effects from the outside.

My point is, good customer service doesn’t begin with your customers, or your employees, or even your products. It begins with you.

Do Not Adjust Your Net

Test Pattern

It could simply be due to the nature of the economy, or perhaps the transition from my previous job to my current one, but I have to admit that over the last month or so I’ve experienced something of a heroic BSOD (that’s “Blue Screen of Death” for those unfamiliar with the acronym). It went unnoticed until recently when I’ve tried to get more original fiction written rather than recycling older things I’ve already completed. As much as I love Akuma and The Jovian Flight, the only way I’m going to prevail in a highly competitive market such as speculative fiction is if I do something original and do it better than anybody else.

I think part of the subtle test pattern that’s been droning in my subconscious is due to actually having work to do day in and day out. Being in a maintenance position for a web development company is like working the front desk at a Jiffy Lube – people bring in their vehicles (in the case of my employers, vehicles for marketing and sales) with what they think might be a terminal problem and it requires some billable hours to sort out the root of the problem, which is likely not as major as it seems. However, a tiny shard of glass lodged in a minute part of the body can still be cripplingly painful and needs to be removed. If you’re not a salesman – and I am in no way, shape, or form one of those – it can be difficult to both relate to a client’s needs and make your own known in a direct and honest way. There’s a reason doctors in a hospital tend to not talk about where the money’s coming from for a procedure. I know I’m drawing parallels between two very hands-on professions and one that doesn’t require dirt or blood under my nails, but it’s still a labor-intensive service industry.

While I don’t feel that I’m in over my head, and my co-workers give me a definite and welcome sense of being part of a family rather than a cog in a machine, the intensity of the labor tends to leave me feeling drained afterwards and it can be difficult to muster creative energy. My novel needs to be finished, and I know how I want it to proceed, but getting from where I am now to where I want to be in terms of the story can seem a daunting task after a long day at the office. Especially when it’s easier to fire up World of Warcraft to knock out some dailies or a dungeon, or cuddle with my wife in front of entertainment saved on our DVR or provided by Netflix – though I’m planning on leveraging the latter for creativity more in future posts.

I guess the point of this post is mostly to remind myself that my system’s in a state of rebooting and should soon be back to normal creative levels as it adjusts to the workload. It’s also material I feel capable of posting in lieu of anything comic book related, since tight finances have curbed my trips to the local comic book story indefinitely.

But I do have a few graphic novels I could review. Hmmm.

Worth A Thousand Words

Kiss

But what I do know
is to us the world is different
As we are to the world
but I guess you would know that.
– VNV Nation, “Illusion”

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