Sometimes organizations loose sight of how every interaction in their work has customer service implications. Sometimes it is possible to loose clients, suppliers or others through oversights due to a loss of focus. 
Every part of an organization has customer service implications and the people responsible must be encouraged to ensure that they do their best to support a positive corporate image. Recently, I have seen a couple of instances where the lack of simple tools makes good customer service tough.
A little real life experience:
Last fall my wife and I had the opportunity to take a two week packaged tour to Italy conducted by Trafalgar Tours. Trafalgar is one of the biggest tour companies in the world with some 20 or so brands under their banner. They work hard to promote their tours with lots of advertising, good information and varied choices through out the world.
Our tour was conducted by a talented, very capable Tour Director who worked exceedingly hard to deliver the trip in a top notch manner. At the end of the tour while headed to our last night everyone was asked to fill in a paper tour evaluation while on the bus.
Sounds good right? Top effort to get info for future benefit and encourage referrals and bookings again.
Where it falls down:
Despite an effort they fall down significantly as a company when it comes to customer service on a post trip basis. Why?
For several reasons which I won't detail here I felt there was a need to provide some feedback on some elements of the tour. I went to Trafalgar's Canadian website to find a feedback form. None existed. I tried using a bounce back form in their sales site which promised an acknowledgement within 24 hours. Filled the form with a brief comment and request. No response. Not even an auto bounce back.
Tried contacting our travel agent for a feedback email and got one suggested. Sent my inquiry to them through this address. Nothing?
Finally, after some further digging I got and email address for a help@ location. Tried this one. Ends up it was actually a help request page for their website where people could register issues for required changes to their site. Obviously, not what I needed.
Surprise, an agent from the site help team reached out to me and offered to forward my message to customer service. I said sure and thanks. He emailed back to say it was sent and to get in touch if I had not heard in a week. Too bad, no response from customer server due to an incorrect email address. He tried again. To date no response from the people he sent my message to. I'll try one more time I guess as I know he is at least trying and it is not really his job.
What does this mean for others?
The above story relates to a company that is highly focused on the the sales support side of their business. They have a very comprehensive and detailed sales effort in a highly competitive business. They offer discounts for repeat business. They seek feedback in one form and they hire good people to do the direct delivery. It should get them great ratings and lots of repeat and referral business.
Unfortunately because they have decided not to provide an easy way for customers and others to contact them with unsolicited feedback they have created a situation which makes for poor customer service and which can rapidly create negative feelings. If asked at the end of our tour last fall what to rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 for customer service I would have been in the range of 7 even with the couple of concerns about our trip that I had. Today based upon my experience trying to contact them for further input I would rate them a 2, and that rating only because of the one employee I have had contact with who has repeatedly attempted to get me a response.
Why does this happen?
I think when this happens it is because organizations get overly focused into one area of feedback. In this case at the sales time and during delivery. They do not provide the means for other communications opportunities.
Every business has multiple times when they can create good will for their company. Don't just focus on the sales stream. Supplier relations, accounts payable activity, shipping departments, public relations, and many other departments in a business have opportunities to create positive good will for the business.
Every employee and every department needs to be encouraged to think about what impact their actions will have on the organization's reputation. Organizationally, make sure you have an easily found and monitored customer comment or feedback tool.
Lee K
