Is Customer Service Dead?

What the consumer wants is a fresh lemon wedge.

Those are not my words. Those are the words of a friend of mine named Brandon Goll. Brandon, and I were seniors and we were taking finals and we took a break and we went out to eat at a Chinese restaurant. He ordered tea. I ordered water. And when he got about halfway through with his tea, the server came by and refilled it and walked away.

He looked at me and said, "Did you see that?" And I said, "What?" He goes, "What the consumer wants is a fresh lemon wedge."  You see, the server just came by and I thought she was doing a great job. She filled up his tea and then walked away from his perspective. He was thinking, I got a fresh glass of tea. I need a fresh lemon wedge. And I started to think people really do have certain expectations of what they want. And it's up to us to anticipate those expectations and deliver on them. Really, this is about customer service.

Unfortunately, as we filmed this video in 2022, customer service is dying. I'm not going to list any names, but you can go to some big department stores or big grocery stores and you can't find anybody to help you, anybody to answer a question. And if you want to get a question answered, you're going to wait in line to do it. Then, you're going to check yourself out. And and then there's no one there to even say thank you.

If you want to distinguish yourself in today's day and age up, your customer service and people will begin to notice. I want you to consider taking four steps to increase your customers experience in your business. First of all, plot out your customers journey. This starts from before their customer as their customer and then after they're a customer. Plot out every point in their journey as they experience their time in your business. Then I want you to take a view from their perspective as you're walking through their customer journey. Think of it from their perspective and then anticipate their needs. Try to think of everything that they expect. Everything or point, and then finally exceed their expectations at every point. So they have a wonderful customer experience.

So I have a challenge for you. I want you to go back and talk with your team. Gather everybody around and focus on your customer experience. You may even want to tell them the fresh lemon wedge story. Here's what's going to happen if you do that. When they go out to restaurants, they're going to notice whether they get a fresh lemon wedge or they get a plate of lemon wedges, or they get no lemon wedges at all. And as they become more aware of that, they're going to raise their level of awareness of customer experience.

And my hope is that customer experience and customer service will become more important to them, and they'll bring that back into your business. And as I always say, as you grow, your company grows.  Keep growing!