Gone are the days of monopoly market, where you sit quietly at your executive desk and customers will come to your store to buy the brand. Competition has made a nail -biter situation for every supplier or vendor in the market. It is no longer a game for the vendors to sell their products and services at their own norms; it's the turn for customers to go with the desired vendor. Simply, "Customer is King of the Market".

To have a competitive edge "Customer Satisfaction" is important. If you are well rated by the customer then you have met his goals. To be in layman terms, it is required to meet the expected satisfaction level of the customer to make him satisfactory or it is the number or percentage of the customer who has rated high for your company by experiencing your products or services and meeting their specific desired goals. It cannot be built in one day, it requires commitment.

A lot of factors do influence to satisfy the customer, let's look on few.

"Customer service is not a department, it's everyone's job - Anonymous"

To discuss on the above saying,

Who is the point of contact?

In general, it happens when a sale is done for a product then the sales person will not be responsible to discuss further. It will be passed to the other departments such as service or support and when the service work is done then they will not be responsible further. If the customer has a service problem (which needs urgent support from the service team) and he/she makes a call to the service/sales person then they will direct him to the so called 24X7 support centre. Question is that, who is going to answer the pain of the customer? By the time you get to know, Customer gets distracted and will switch to other vendor.

It is not that you are done with your job, it is the responsible for everyone who are involved in the sale/project to answer customer. Let me take you on the above discussion.
Even though it is a process for the organization to understand the customer's service need or issue through 24X7 supports but sometimes it is required to resolve the issue of the customer at the earliest. Being from sales and marketing backdrop, most of the customers (India) feedback says that they do not like to log a call in the support centre because it eats a lot of time. And, someone from the other vendor goes directly to resolves the issue on time then for sure the customer will be happy, because "he has relieved his pain". Hence, it is necessary for a company to look for the urgency in the issue and try to act on that ASAP. Here, two things can happen- one you are losing your process and gaining customer satisfaction or you are losing your customer and making your process streamline. It is your turn to take a call on the options. Obliviously, second one to choose for, As well said in 80-20 rule.

Even sometimes the promo of the company says that they have a "customer service department" to answer their issue on right time. But, is it really works? Yes and No. It works when you answer your customer problem on time and No when you don't. Let me give you a recent example happened with me. I had a problem with my three air conditioners at office. I called the local service person of XXX and asked him for support, but he never came back. I thought it is required to log a call to the support centre for immediate support. Surprisingly, their service person called me within twenty minutes and they resolved the issue in less than two hours of time. It is good to happen when your service department works on the process to serve the customer and it will not when other way goes.

On the other hand, I had a bitter experience with one of my customer when my service engineer did not turn up on time. The customer was in our prospect bank and we don't want to lose him. One day, he had a problem with the projector in the conference hall; and he needs an immediate attention on that as their CEO has some meeting on that day. He called me and asked me to resolve the issue at the earliest. I made a call to my service engineer and requested him to go for that as it makes a sense to support him on time. But, as per the process (carrying documents, service equipment's) took lot of time and the customer had a bad experience with our service. Finally, he swapped other room projector there and continued the meeting but it was on his mind-set that we did not help him on time. And, the rest happened.

To sum it up, "Service/Support plays a vital role to meet the customer satisfaction level".

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