Common Sense eCommerce

It seems that there are companies that just don’t do Customer Service - unless they’re forced to by competition.  Take a look at your local public utility company.  If they’re like ours, they’re hardly the models of exemplary Customer Service.  After all, where else can you get your water or electricity?  They know you can’t go anywhere else and they treat their customers accordingly.

But what happens when competition is introduced?  Think about what has happened with the local or regional phone companies.  In our case, that’s Qwest. Just a few short years ago, you could have included Qwest in that ‘public utility’ category with no competition and treating their customers accordingly.

In recent years however, competition has been introduced.  You can now get wireless phone service from a wide variety of carriers.  You can get a Voice Over IP (VOIP) phone solution from a broad range of choices.  In many areas, you can even get phone service from your cable company (via VOIP)!

Presumably adapting to that changing market, Qwest stepped up to a higher level of customer service.  In fact, they might now be considered a model of large corporate customer service.  Is this ’stepping up’ genuine or bogus?  It’s debatable whether that even matters.  What matters is the customer won and competition probably drove that company to step up to a higher level of customer service.

Tags: Customer Service, Customer Relations, Customer Relationship Management

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