Customer Service Doesn't Have To Be Hard. Read These 5 Tips

Customer Service.  Your call is very important to us.  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

The bulk of my work is with small/medium sized nonprofits.  In the vast majority their customer service is.....let's call it lacking.  In many cases this is because of the monopoly nature of the nonprofit.  If you need housing assistance, it's not like you can take your request to a different organization.  Nope, you either deal with bad customer service or go homeless.   Not optimal choices.

Seth Godin has a great post about customer service. 

• Spend more money on this (and give it higher priority).
• Collect data about the nature of the calls...then fix the problems creating the calls.
• If it's going to take a while and you have to put someone on hold for lengthy,  offer a simple way to be called back, and then make sure it works.
• If you're closed, give us the hours you are open.
• If someone leaves a message, ensure they get a call back within 24 hours

Rationing By The Queue is a strategy far too many nonprofits use in order to handle a heavy case load.  In essence, it's making the process of receiving service so cumbersome that only the most dedicated will endure the labyrinth of procedure required to get the needed service.  Bad customer service is just one aspect of this type of rationing.

We can change that....and the phone is a great place to start.