Please Wait, I'm Blogging ...

Our subject this week is technology, its ability to enhance our lives and promote communication. As part of that study, we are to incorporate it into a blog.

This week is also the beginning of customer service classes, designed to improve our skills at serving and dealing with the public.

I concede that a part of our service necessarily entails use of modern technology to assist our customers but at its core, customer service means face to face listening which, ideally, leads to understanding the customer's wants resulting, ideally, in the application of service skills to provide to the customer what s/he seeks. We aren't going to e-mail the customer or read the customer's e-mail; we're going to talk to them. We aren't going to tweet them their wants; we're going to show them where it is or how to obtain it.

My point, and I do have one, is that technology is a tool to enhance our service to the customers. It isn't an end in itself. All the technological advances in history are meaningless to our customers unless and until that technology helps them obtain what they need. From the customer viewpoint, it doesn't matter how we satisfy their request, just that we do. And the better or faster we do it, the faster our customers will expect it. When our systems are down and we cannot access the catalog or internet, our customers don't care; they still expect results from us, not from technology.