Praise

[Image Source: Felicity French]

My Customer Service post seems to be being viewed quite frequently which made me want to follow on from a brief point I made at the end of my spiel. 

Praise.

Praise can be few and far between if you work in a customer based environment, there can be countless times where you go above and beyond for hundreds of people but only receive a genuine 'thank you' from 1 in 50. 

Managers can be equally guilty of not passing on the praise even when they have noted you have done a good job. My previous manager rarely praised me for what I did for the company until the point of my notice period and well, lets just say the praise gates opened. 

It was very sweet and appreciated but it would have helped me feel more appreciated if he'd actually praised me when I was actually doing a good job but feeling like I didn't want be there anymore. 

I had my corporate induction this week to my new employers and we briefly touched on the subject of good and bad customer service. We also asked the question;

'Why do we only generally remember the bad customer services we experience?'

It's easy to get behind a keyboard or spout off your frustrations to someone when you're angry about how you have been treated and write a scathing TripAdvisor post about a restaurant, or head to Twitter or Facebook to complain directly to the companies social media team.  

I think we need to remember that it is equally as easy to do exactly the same thing when you come away from somewhere feeling satisfied or even thrilled at the customer service you have experienced.

A customer representative will never begrudge you expressing your thanks or even a thankful email sent to head office. 

We sometimes had customers emailing or phoning through thanking us for our service at my previous jobs and you know what, it made me glow from the inside out. Even more so knowing that someone had gone out of their way to write the email out. 

So, in a long winded way, I think what I'm trying to say to myself (I am very guilty of all of the above, minus the TripAdvisor posts) and to everyone else is write that email or Tweet to that company thanking them for their customer representatives, it might just trickle down to them and make their day.

Toodles.

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