Providing Reliable Customer Service

Introduction

As competition is increasing and the products offered in the market are increasing and more varied, consumers become increasingly demanding. They not only look for good prices and quality products but also good customer service or, in other words, a friendly, pleasant atmosphere, convenience, personalized service, prompt attention, and so on (Odgers, pp. 13). When a customer not only finds the product he is looking for, but also receives a good service or care, he is then satisfied. This satisfaction makes the customer come back and buy again and he is also very likely to recommend the company to other consumers.

However, if a customer is dissatisfied and also receives poor service or attention, it makes him not only leave the firm, but most likely will speak ill of the firm and discuss about the negative experience he had averagely to 9-20 people.

Discussion

It has been witnessed several times that the company is facing a problem in handling customer complaints, which is very crucial for the firm's reputation. The complaints are being handled in a timely manner and such delays result in losing our loyal customers. However, there is a strong need to implement an effective system that may handle the complaints efficiently in order to improve the customer service that will lead to increase in customer retention. This memo intends to provide a detailed insight to the prevailing problem and a suitable solution to customer service via flow chart that shall be implemented after the manager's approval.

Customer loyalty describes the status of the customer. As long as the customer is loyal, he is willing to communicate his complaints to the company (Woods, J and Zemke, R, p.219). The aim of this pattern is to show the impact of ignored complaints. The customer loyalty is solely influenced by the way the company handles complaints. If the company does not react to the customers' complaints, his loyalty weakens and so does his willingness to communicate complaints. This complies with the findings of Woods, J and Zemke, R (p.220), who suggest that both complaint satisfaction and customer loyalty will be higher; the better a company has dealt with a complaint and vice versa.

The willingness to communicate complaints equals the range of the customer loyalty. As long as the customer is still loyal and interested in staying with the firm, he puts effort into communicating complaints and giving the company and chance to make up for service failures. Therefore, the complaints actually communicated to the company depend on the status of the willingness. As long as a certain level of loyalty and willingness to communicate is given, every complaint will be communicated. As soon as this level is under-run, no further complaints will be communicated to the company. However, the case is completely different in this firm. The complaints by customers have been increasing with each passing day and several complaints are being recorded repeatedly by various customers. This shows that complaints are not being worked on to resolve and it may ...