Appliance Service Repair Company Providing Customer Service After the Sale

While it is important that customers are spoken to in an understandable manner and cared for while their appliances are being serviced, there are two other aspects of customer service that are often neglected by GE appliance service businesses.

Customer Service Prior to Service

You may think that there isn't much pre-sell involved with appliance service. Either someone needs their appliances serviced or they don't, right? That is actually very wrong! One local company understands that the right amount of customer service prior to a service can result in many more customers down the line and they stay very busy as a result of this knowledge!

Potential customers will often call several local GE appliance service businesses before deciding who they feel the most comfortable hiring. If you are in customer service mode on that very first phone call you will put them at ease, make them feel comfortable with you, and make your service stand out in their mind even if they do call around to other places.

Also, if you use the right customer service strategies in the beginning, you could find that customers start referring you to other people they know before you even make a trip to their home to fix their appliances. Word of mouth is the best way to advertise because it's free, and it starts with customer service from the very first phone call.

Customer Service After the Service

Once you have repaired their appliance, the sale is over and you move on to the next customer, right? Not so fast! Even if you do an excellent job repairing their appliances and answering all their questions during the service, you are missing a great opportunity to expand your business if you just disappear.

Any reputable appliance service will remain open to future repairs if something goes wrong with an appliance, but you have to take it a step further. You have to follow the lead of one local business and discover the art of after service customer service.

Think of ways to keep your service in their mind so they will remember your name when they need appliance service in the future or when someone they know asks for a referral. You want to keep your company name in their memory, which is best accomplished by sending a post card to say thank you for their service. You can even include coupons for future services within a given time period or send periodical postcards checking on them.

This type of after-service customer service makes a customer feel valued and appreciated and it keeps you at the top of their mind if they do need GE appliance service sometime in the future.

This is the only way to earn repeat business and keep customers from calling up other appliance service businesses and going with someone else.

Remember, customers do not want to deal with businesses of any variety that are disrespectful, rude, or mediocre in quality. All General White Goods are experts and they are specialists in Ge service

Just as you already focus on the quality of your services and make sure every appliance is repaired to the best of your ability, you have to put the extra effort into top notch customer service.

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How to Restore Customer Satisfaction after Customer Service Failure

A customer service failure, simply defined, is customer service performance that fails to meet an individual's expectations. Typically, when a service failure occurs, a customer will expect to be compensated for the inconvenience in the form of any combination of refunds, credits, discounts or apologies.

The success of such customer service recovery efforts is determined by the individual's expectations and perceptions of the organization. Two key elements impact any effort to restore customer satisfaction: the strength of customer relationships and the severity of service failure.

Service failure: Service performance that fails to meet expectations

The strength of the customer relationship with the organization prior to a customer service failure has a buffering effect in the event of failure. Research suggests that customers who expect the relationship to continue actually have lower service recovery expectations, and in turn, are more satisfied with customer service performance after recovery.

While this may seem counterintuitive at first glance, consider the expectations of customers with a stronger relationship with the organization. A customer who does not have much commitment to the organization tends to be more transaction-focused and expects immediate service recovery when a particular transaction fails to meet expectations.

Conversely, a customer with strong commitment may demand less immediate compensations with the expectation that strong future interactions may correct the customer service failure over time. Such findings suggest that service providers not only have measures in place to identify the strength of customer relationships but also the ability to react to customer service failures.

The severity of the customer service failure moderates the relationship between customer satisfaction and commitment. Even with strong service recovery, research indicates that customers may still be upset, engage in negative word-of-mouth, and be less likely to develop trust with and commitment to the organization, if the original customer service failure was really bad.

In these cases, managers may need to do more to mend the strength of customer relationships and restore commitment. To identify such cases, service organizations need to track and identify occurrences of customer service failure as well as the severity of each.

The data available at the point of any customer service failure, most notably the information provided by the customer at the time of the complaint, should be viewed as critical marketing research data necessary not only for immediate service recovery but for improvement of future performance.

Remember, a customer service failure is defined as a failure to meet customer expectations and the success of any recovery effort is measured by each individual customer against his/her own expectations. Therefore, managers would be well served to conduct a post-recovery assessment of customer expectations and perceptions of recovery performance against those expectations.

Classic customer service failure: serving cold

The impact of service failure recovery on customer satisfaction can be easily illustrated with a familiar example. Consider the case of a restaurant patron complaining about his meal being served cold. In all likelihood, this is not a severe customer service failure if managed properly.

If the customer's server fails to offer a sufficient apology and brings back a reheated meal after a 20-minute wait, a first-time customer may be immediately deterred and never return. If this is a long-time customer who has always received excellent service, he may or may not write this failure off, but either way will expect this sub-par service to be countered with excellent service in the future.

While you may expect the customer with a long history of having received excellent service to be more demanding in the case of such a failure, in reality the new customer has the higher expectations. His perceptions of the restaurant are impacted by only this one experience where customer service performance failed to meet his expectations. Without a formal apology from a supervisor, a refund, and perhaps a future credit, this new customer may allow this experience to so alter his expectations of customer service performance at this restaurant as to prevent him from returning.

The long-time customer has his expectations set by a long history of excellent dining experiences and may be easier to satisfy in the immediate wake of a customer service failure.

In either case, the restaurant manager must immediately begin to turn his focus on ensuring future service delivery levels and enhancing the strength of customer relationships with each of these patrons.

About the author

Brian Backer is a project manager with Polaris Marketing Research. The Atlanta marketing research firm specializes in consumer and business customer service satisfaction, including service satisfaction tracking and service quality measurement. Polaris? state-of-the-art marketing research also includes customer satisfaction and loyalty measurement programs, including personalized project management. Backer can be reached by phone at 866-217-7014 during normal business hours.

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After 80 Failed Inventions, This 84-Year-Old Created The Game Of The Year

George Weiss has spent the last 45 years filing patents for failed inventions from his Brooklyn basement.

But it wasn't until three years ago, when he was cutting up plastic tiles, that he thought of Dabble: a fast-paced word game that is now in 42 stores nationwide and just won the 2011 Game of the Year Award from Creative Child Magazine in the Family Word Games category.

"I guess some people think I'm crazy for spending so much time down here, but this is what I enjoy doing," Weiss tells the New York Daily News. "I just can't give it up. It's not an addiction, but what am I supposed to do, watch TV all day?"

The premise of the game is simple: each player gets 20 letters and has five minutes to come up with a word of two, three, four, five or six letters. The winner's score is the sum of the leftover tiles of the other players.

Some of Weiss' past creations included convertible Christmas ornaments, do-it-yourself storage systems, and a cube card that Hallmark refused to buy.

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