Support is the Essential Element of Service

Don’t you hate the many ways in which organisations try to avoid providing good quality support, to you, the customer?

I often see advice on how to minimise the effort of support. This is no doubt well-intentioned, but for me it completely misses the point of support. Much of the advice is actually promoting ways to avoid making people available to provide support to customers, such as…

• Self-service

• Deflect with chat-bots

• Putting non-specialists on support

• Automated responses

• Lowering customer expectations

These elements of a complete service do all have their place, but they should not be relied on as a substitute for good service. I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that customers are entitled to a helpful service.

Luckily our support team, backed up by everyone else who works in EDI Plus, think the same way as I do. That is why our clients and trading partners rate our service so highly.

So I would like to pass on a big “thank you” shout out to my team, from the customers who thank me on their behalf.