One of the first signs of a sinking ship in business is poor customer service. To magnify this fact, when customers are not satisfied with the level of service they receive after the sale, poorly handled relations can reverse all the effort and expense invested in advertising, sales, marketing, product development and company image building. This scenario is playing out every day in both large and small businesses across the country. If you think businesses understand the importance of serving their customers, just take some time to do a little research. When companies hire people to perform these duties, the pay associated with customer service jobs is often less than what they are willing to pay for good clerical or reception help.

Many large firms have rushed into implementing completely automated systems for handling customer issues. In dealing with these types of systems, I have not found a single person who tells me they enjoy the experience of wading through touch tone menus to find answers to their needs. The reason why a business implements an automated phone answering system is to channel the large volume of frequently encountered issues through the automated process in order to devote more resources to less frequently asked questions. Even though these systems seem to manage such traffic, there are untold numbers of people who become so frustrated by the experience, they stop trying before they obtain the information they were seeking, rendering the solution inadequate. For every customer who turns away in disgust over the level of service they receive, there is an opening for someone else to capture their business. When a low paid, unenthusiastic service representative answers a call, the end results can be equally devastating to the future relationship with a customer. Using automation to divert the flow of frequently encountered problems does not solve the lack of understanding and communication that causes the problems to occur in the first place. Instead of funneling the issue down some automated sink hole, it would help to have someone who is able to find methods to eliminate the reasons why people are dealing with these troubles in the first place.

People do not generally interpret their importance to your business from the perspective of how much money they represent in profit. Each person approaches their interaction from the perspective that they are the only customer you will ever have. Even the best of systems will occasionally disappoint the expectations of isolated individuals, but when the numbers of disgruntled customers swell into a significant group, the phenomenon can rapidly reverse the fortunes of a company in a very short interval. If a company is not willing to invest an appropriate level of resources to properly training customer service staff, they might as well hire people to schedule appointments with more important staff members in the sales and marketing areas of the company, or directly with the CEO. Failure to achieve and maintain good customer relations will guarantee loss of income. If an executive is not willing to put the responsibility of steering the company