Customer Service Definition - basic

The impetus for this article was born out of frustration while doing a Google search looking for answers to a very straightforward query, "customer service definition" or some semblance of the phrase. What I found was 21 million different answers to the same question! Holy Google Batman!

Talk about confusing, after meshing through article after article, a pattern did develop though with a common thread. The common thread being, meeting or exceeding customers needs. Now that’s more along the lines of what I expected but I still wasn't satisfied with the answer. In fact the answers were so varied and said so many different ways it made the purpose of the quest seem daunting, and the answer somewhat elusive. It was during this search among the millions of answers that an old saying crept into my conscious thought and that was:

"Some people try to find things in this game that don't exist but football is only two things - blocking and tackling."
------Vince Lombardi

Coach Lombardi, he got it. He understood that in order to be successful in a very complex game, it came down to doing the two fundamental things that matter most and that is blocking and tackling. Without those two things, forget about the objective of putting points on the board or stopping your opponent from doing the same to you. Needless to say, during practice you can be assured that the emphasis was placed on those two key fundamental tactics. Without them, all the best moves, finest arms and fastest feet simply didn’t matter.

In other words, it’s about the fundamentals or basics, not all the nuances and whirling dervishes. When we’re talking about customer & service, put simply we’re talking about the customer and serving their needs. That’s it!

Let me restate that again.

"Customer service is about the customer (not you) and serving their needs or wants to their satisfaction (not yours)."

If you break this down into its two key elements, customer and service according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary they are respectively;

Customer - one that purchases a commodity or service.
Service - the work performed by one that serves.

Put those together and you have, "one that purchases a commodity or service" and is helped by "the work performed by one that serves."

While it still would not have been a complete or functional answer in my opinion, for the purpose of my query, that would’ve come close to sufficing and should have been the method I used initially but alas, I would not have had this soapbox to bludgeon the binary world with had I started there.

Oh and by the way, speaking to fundamentals, I have a problem with adding the phrase "exceeding the customers needs" which I’ll address in an upcoming blog.

So there you have it. Customer Service definition in a nutshell not a universe.