Term Paper on "Narrative of Customer Service Experience"

Term Paper 12 pages (3251 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

narrative of customer service experience over a 10-year period. The writer uses the Kolb model to explore the experience and narrate it in terms the reader can understand. There were five sources used to complete this paper.

Customer service has been an important part of the business world since business began. If a company has strong professional customer service representation, the product or service that the company sells can be showcased at its best. Customer service provides the customer with an avenue to get their questions answered or problems addressed. Customer service gives the company an outlet for which their customers feel their voices are being heard. Whether it is the placing of an order, a complaint or a need about an order or product or general questions that need to be answered, customer service representatives are often the first human contact a person has with a company.

When it comes to telecommunications, customer service representation is often the only contact a customer has with a company. Telecommunication customer service is specifically important because those representatives can make or break the company with the way they handle and treat the customer who calls in.

Customer service in telecommunications is a fast paced and exciting field. One has to remember at all times that their voice represents the product or service that is being sold. The voice provides a smile, a frown, concern or confidence all at the same time. A voice in customer service in telecommunications assures the customer that things will be worked out and that they are valued. When I first began my work in customer service in the telecommunications field I had a lot to learn. I was not aware of how the tone of voice can make all the difference, nor did I take seriously the importance of representing the company in the best possible light with each and every call. As my experience expanded, and I began to develop skills in the field I realized that customer service representatives are the backbone of the company. Over the past decade I have developed skill sets that provide me with a base to work in any field but I prefer telecommunications because it is the one field in which the customer service representative is truly often the only contact the customer has with the company. I enjoy that responsibility and the challenge of keeping each customer a happy customer.

Concrete Experience

The concrete experience that I have had in the field of customer service telecommunications has developed to the point I am now charged with the supervision of 50 customer service representatives within the company.

When I first began I was assigned a small desk in a room with many other customer service representatives. Our job was to answer the phone, and provide support to customers who would call in and ask about their order. We had a computer on each desk from which we could look up and track the orders to determine what stage of the game they were in. The orders were for telephone services for a cellular phone company. Most of the calls that came in were customers who wanted to know when their service could be turned on, or if it had been turned off because the invoice was not paid on time they wanted to know when they could get it back on and how much it would cost to do so.

It was a bit of a baptism by fire as most customers who called in were not happy. It was our job to make them happy, fix their problem, assist them in correcting their invoice issues and create a relationship that would encourage the customer to stay with the company even though they had the complaint.

A enjoyed that position because it taught me how to be happy and positive sounding even under stressful circumstances. Customers would call in and deny that they had failed to pay their bill. They would become irate and demand that I figure out a way to get their service turned back on, and I would have to try and guide them to pay their bill, with the late charge, without making them angry so that they took their business elsewhere.

One of the things that helped me in this position was the fact that the customer signed a contract when they opened their service, therefore they could not just walk away. This was a point that both helped and hurt me during my initial entrance to the customer service field as people called in and I practiced with each call.

With the calls I would gather information, enter the computer and access their account. I would then dispense the information that they needed to correct their particular problem or need. I was also charged with following their progress. We had certain times during the week where were we were charged with follow up calls. In these cases we would have to call back customers we had helped earlier in the week with certain specific issues and ask if their problem was resolved. If so we asked if they had been happy with the service they received. If not we would help them work it out at that time and provide them with a discount on their next bill for the trouble they had encountered.

This part of the job was stressful because we did not call our own customers, but we called the customers of others that we worked with. This meant that someone else called my customers and found out if I handled the situation well and professionally. It was an eye opener to say the least. It showed me that I didn't always present myself the way thought I had, and it also showed me that I could handle constructive and not so constructive criticism and use it to improve my job performance.

After several years at this company I moved to another company that offered more money. In this company I worked in a cubicle with one other customer service representative. We were the initial contact the customer had with the customer as they had to do their ordering through our department. It was not considered a sales position however, because of the tasks that we performed to assist that customer with their customer service needs. We would answer the phone when the customer was in the phone que, we would ascertain the customer need, suggest several products and follow the order through to the end. In addition we answered customer service calls in which established customers who had questions, complaints, or needs could ask us for assistance. Our job was to be sure they were treated professionally and with courtesy at all times.

It was at this job that I undertook my first training experience. We had hired a new customer service representative and my supervisor asked me to let her sit with me and learn the job. I was nervous at first because I was afraid I would not train her well. At this point I was confident in my abilities as a customer service representative but was not sure I had the skills to teach someone else how to do it.

My fears were unfounded however, as the girl turned out to be bright, eager and pleasant. These qualities made it easy for me to instruct her and guide her in the position she had been hired to fulfill.

Once I trained the first person my boss began to send all new customer service representatives to me for training. I developed a training method that I followed each time. It was about three days long. On the first day they would simply observe me doing my job as I explained each call when I would complete it. On the second day they would begin to take calls during the slow periods while I stepped in when it got busy so that we would not get behind or disappoint customers by making them wait on hold too long. On the third day they would run the show with me acting as observer and mentor.

This was something I enjoyed doing but my heart was still in the actual work of customer service so I eventually moved to a company that did not need me to train the new customer service representatives. It was at this company that I became a customer service supervisor.

Most organizations approach customer service as purely a training issue. Although there are aspects of a customer service initiative that relate to specific skills, the issue is a much broader one than that. Customer service is a way of life and a part of the culture of successful organizations. Programs based just on teaching employees to smile and be pleasant almost always end in failure. These skills are short-lived, if good employees are working in flawed systems (Clark, 2004)."

Customer service tasks that I performed at this company included testing the system by… READ MORE

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