What is customer service, really?

Does customer service mean anything anymore?
Do we collectively lean too heavily on customer service as our primary differentiation?

The concept of customer service has been front and center on my mind for a few months now.  Each year during tax season while CPAs are nose down, we are busy trying to figure out what we can do differently and, more importantly, better.  Over the course of our planning season we noticed that each of our conversations and plans came back to the question “How can we serve firms better?”.  It’s interesting that no one ever said we’re serving firms well enough or why would we need to serve anyone better than we already do?  The reality is that a true pursuit to serve well is never ending.  If introspection and/or progression stops, service fails.

To my surprise a great example of this showed up just the other day when a crew came to wash the outside of our building.  Xcentric is located on the 4th floor of a five-story all glass (well, almost all glass) building.  As the crew inched up the building- and I do mean inched because it took them days to complete- they eventually ended up right outside my window.  My first thought was, there is no way I’d strap myself to some cables and hang a few hundred feet above the ground all day.  Eventually I got past that thought and spent a few minutes watching one of the guys clean the window; I was mesmerized.  He had turned his everyday task into an art.  As silly as it sounds, he was lost in the perfection of doing his job right.  He didn’t miss a spot; he didn’t waste one movement. He knew what he was going to do next without even thinking about it.  He was an expert in his craft.  He wasn’t just cleaning a window; he was serving me, his boss, and his company in a tremendous way.  I, undoubtedly, would leave a window in much worse shape and would take much longer to clean it.  Not to mention, I don’t think you could get me up on the side of the building in the first place.  But regardless of what he was doing, he pursued excellence.  That should be all of our goals at some level.

Customer Service is not dead.  It’s still as important as ever.  In fact, it occurred to me that what we do is no more or less important than what the window washer was doing that day.  In our world, anyone can build a server or maintain a network and anyone can do a tax return or perform an audit.  It’s those of us who pursue excellence and refuse to get comfortable with how we serve that will really make a difference.

Here’s one new thing Xcentric is doing to improve how we serve our clients: Xcentric Account Team.