Customer Service

It's hard to write about customer service. Most of the blog posts I see talk about what it isn't, not what it is. Most of my posts on the topic are bad examples. Negative examples are more fun. And easier to come by.

Paul Brown's Toolkit column, a regular in The New York Times' Small Business webpage, focuses on For Customer Service this week.

This one caught my attention this morning because it actually includes, of all outrageous things, a definition of what customer service is:

Writing on sbinfocanada.about.com, which offers resources for small-business owners, Doug Howardell of ACA Group, an alliance of consultants, says his group defines customer service as “the ability of an organization to constantly and consistently give the customer what they want and need.”

He also cites some additional positive suggestions from allbusiness.com about how to do it.