Customer Service or Servicing the Customer?

 

With my oldest daughter’s wedding rapidly encroaching, this weekend my better half and I went shopping for a new suit. The event itself will be black tie optional, but I later learned that only the groomsman were mandated to wear a tux. Dark suits for the other male guests were strongly encouraged.

So, we went to a custom tailor nearby and were waited on hand and foot, shoulder, leg, and waist - literally. The sales rep took the requisite measurements, gave us the choice of everything from fabric patches for the suit, buttons, lining and even an optional monogram on the inside pocket. For those keeping score at home I took it.

Everything was fed into his iPad and seconds later the finished product was imaged for our inspection. Of course, the actual suit would take several weeks to complete, but we both were non-plussed by the customer service.

Now we’ve all heard testimonials of companies that consistently get high marks when it comes to customer service, which in my humble opinion is rapidly becoming a lost art. Like Nordstrom of Seattle, which legend has it, allowed someone to return a car tire even though the company does not retail automotive parts. Or a restaurant company whose name escapes me at the moment, sent one of the servers to a nearby McDonald’s when a child guest complained that there was nothing on the menu they liked.

Like someone once told me, customer service is not giving customers what they expect, it’s giving them more than they expect.

And it’s no different among CPAs who give great customer service to their clients have a far greater chance of retaining them.

Along those lines, I recently read an article which chronicled entire cities – as opposed to single companies - that had subpar customer service ratings. Usually, companies with the most customers have the most customer service complaints lodged against them whereas “platinum” retailers such as Bentley or Brietling for example, whose products often exceed a price tag of 300K, have far lower incidents.

Thus, a company called tollfreeforwarding.com used two methodologies to arrive at the worst customer service city in America – Google search trends for number of complaints from April 2020-April 2021 and FCC complaint statistics for each state/city.

With 100 representing the bottom, the cities with the worst customer service ratings were in order:

 

1.       Pittsburgh 81/100

2.       Baltimore 74/100

3.       Atlanta 74/100

4.       Richmond 73/100

5.       Sacramento 72/100

6.       Orlando 69/100

7.       Las Vegas 68/100

8.       Jacksonville 66/100

9.       Miami 62/100

10.   Tampa 59/100

I guess I won’t be buying suits at these cities anytime soon.