In the words of
Michael Moore
President/CEO
Morehead Pools
Shreveport, La.
Customer service comes down to determining what the client wants and doing all you can to achieve that.
I’m following what my father, and my grandfather before him, practiced — ensuring our employees can swiftly address problems or, at the very least, present the client with a plan even if we can’t execute it immediately. Not everything has to go up the food chain to satisfy the customer, so we try to avoid saying, “Let me ask my manager first.”
When you give employees decision-making power, they may not make the same choices as you — and their solutions may be more expensive than yours. But it’s valuable to look at the end result. If the solution costs more than anticipated, we consider it money well spent on good advertising — we kept the client happy!
Education is one of our core values. My father followed the four E’s: educate, equip, edify, empower. You cannot empower your team without the first three E’s.
Also, our staff attends 7 Habits of Effective Leaders workshops to learn how to approach conflict resolution when dealing with clients and co-workers. Because customer-service issues may overlap departments, all staff members must be able to work together.
To keep track of customer satisfaction levels, a third-party service sends us all online reviews from various platforms. We also conduct customer surveys after project completion and randomly call clients to ask how we did. We’re exploring new tools to improve our reaction time to service calls.
If we receive negative feedback, we respond immediately — within an hour or so. We will never call out a client if we find they’re being unreasonable or the issue is not our fault. Instead, we try to find out how we can make it right for that customer.
Negative online reviews can cost us a lead. However, nine times out of 10, a customer will update their review based on our responsiveness.
You can’t please everybody, but you have to try every time. So don’t give up — and don’t get complacent. We are grateful that our customers choose us, but we know we don’t have it all figured out yet. We work to improve every day.
