Universal vs Subjective Bad Service

As a business focused on customer satisfaction, great customer service always needs to be your goal. If you could imagine a customer satisfaction scale, where 1 is "poor customer service" and 10 is "perfect customer service," you should always continue to aim closer to the ten, even if your current score is 9.5. The better your customer service is, the better your customer satisfaction will be.

But one of the most interesting things about customer service is that a 10 isn't possible. That's because there is a large subjective component to customer service that will always come into play. Most people have had experience with the following: Eating at a restaurant run by foreign workers, such as a Vietnamese Pho restaurant, their version of good customer service is to take your order, give you your food, and walk away.

That's it. For some that's great customer service. For others that is understandably poor customer service.

Eating at an Olive Garden, the method of providing customer service there is more proactive. The waiters are at your table constantly, cracking jokes and trying to talk to you while you eat your meal. To many that is considered good customer service.

But others simply want to be left alone to eat, and would see this as annoying – if not bad customer service. Two completely different methods of delivering customer service, two completely different ways that someone views that type of service. Indeed, even a "lack of friendliness" may not be terrible customer service, depending on the mood of the person shopping.

Ideally, your goal is to teach your staff not just how to provide good customer service, but how to avoid universally bad customer service. Universally bad customer service is being slow to respond to a customer's needs, show rudeness at customer questions, display considerable unprofessionalism, etc. In a way you need to teach damage control first, and then afterward give your employees the skills to not only provide great customer service, but to identify what type of customer service the person wants. But what's clear is that customer service is always going to be viewed subjectively, so while you should always avoid universally bad customer service and try to teach employees how to provide useful service to the customers, one should never expect that the type of service you're providing is perfect, because you never know how someone is going to view that service subjectively.