Forecaster and essayist Paul Saffo encourages customer service departments to only make promises they can keep.

Topic: Creating Value for the Customer

Paul Saffo: The important thing about customer service in an age of the web and the internet is above all, be honest and make expectations realistic. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver. Don’t let your enthusiasm for your company claim that service is better than it is.

Take a company like Amazon. You cannot reach a human being at Amazon. Well you can but it’s very, very hard. And yet everybody is very happy with Amazon’s customer service because Amazon makes it really clear. If you have a problem, send us an email. They don’t promise that you’ll be able to reach a human operator. They do exactly what they say, and that is talk to us by email.

I think the most important thing that a company can do, not just in the customer space but the employee space, is to be completely open and completely honest. Don’t pretend that you’re doing something that you can not do.

There’s an old saying in Silicon Valley, “It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.” And so a lot of companies say, “Gosh, you know, we can’t talk to our customers. We can’t interact with them properly.” That’s really a problem. Well, that may be a feature. Your customers may in fact not want to interact with you, and if you’re just upfront with customers that you can’t interact with them, they will handle their own customer service.

Conducted on: June 18, 2009.