When we set out to create ScanDigital, one of the primary goals of the business was to eliminate the fine print. Meaning we never want our customers to have to dig through pages and pages of our website to understand the service we provide. Growing up my mother always emphasized with us the golden rule and this has carried into to my business life. I constantly try to put myself in our customers’ shoes and imagine how I would want a company to interact with me.

I am very proud of our customer service team and the superb service they provide to our customers. I have been encouraged by the enthusiast positive reaction and feedback our customers provide on this front. It seems in this day and age people are pre-conditioned to expect to spend much of their time on hold when dialing a toll free customer service line. I am not sure how this happened, but I can tell you it goes against almost every business principle I have ever learned.

I came across an article about a month ago called “7 Habits of Highly Effective Managers” (the full article can be found here: http://foundread.com/2007/10/18/7-habits-of-highly-effective-managers/). As I was reading the article, I realized that many of the principles correlated with the same principles I have tried to instill in our customer service team. The principles mentioned in the article are as follows:

1. Know Your Limits
2. Listen First Before Speaking
3. Ask “Why?” not “What?”
4. Be Decisive
5. Be Responsive
6. Communicate Frequently
7. Manage Passion

From a customer service perspective many of these are the same. To correlate these, my keys for our superb customer service:

1. Know Your Limits - If you do not know the answer to every one of a customer’s questions they will be much happier if you turn them over to someone that can answer their questions.
2. Listen First Before Speaking – Our customers’ questions span a broad range of topics and often the best thing we can do is listen first and speak second.
3. Ask “Why?” not “What?” – This is a particularly important one and not necessarily the most intuitive, but in order to provide the highest level of customer service we need to understand why our customers are using our service and how they intend to use the digital images. For example, a customer who wishes to use the files digitally we will want to recommend our “Normal” resolution levels; however, if the customer wants to create enlarged reprints or plans to use the images in a professional capacity then they should use our higher resolution settings.
4. Be Decisive – The process of digitizing is foreign to many of our customers and they are looking for us to provide clear, straight forward answers in a decisive manner.
5. Be Responsive – Our customers trust us with their precious photos and memories which makes it critical to our business that we be available and responsive. Doing otherwise would be unfair to our customers and would be terrible for our business. On top of that, its just the right thing to do.
6. Communicate Frequently – This idea is similar to #5, but again the idea is to keep the customer informed at all times. This puts their mind at ease.
7. Manage Passion – Our service is great and I love the passion our employees feel for it, but that does not mean we should stop improving our service. My goal is to constantly tweak and improve our service and system to provide the most user-friendly, hassle free service possible. Sometimes this means we need to recognize that our customers have great insights into where we can improve the service and in turn we need to be open to their suggestions. It is for this very reason that I still personally make time to take customer calls from time to time. It is important that we understand our customer their needs and motivation for using our service.