Customer Service is the Foundation of our business.

I thought that I would post this memo I sent out to our personnel at CNS. We sometimes get complacent with how we interact with our clients and I used this to make a point. Got some really good feedback from my folks so I thought I would share it.


Why do you choose to go back to your favorite restaurant? Is it the food or the service? Have you ever been to a place that the food was great but the service you received was bad? Do you go back? Will it be your first choice if you do? My guess is not. The bottom line becomes: how well you get treated at the place you spend your money determines whether or not you go back.
To really understand how to provide great customer service we need to define just what it is.

Customer Service is delivering our organization’s services or products in a way that our customers can access them in the most efficient, effective, economical, humanly satisfying and pleasurable manner possible.

Sounds good right? We address the 3 E’s with our Products and Service Plans. We have partnered with the best in the industry to ensure our product quality is unsurpassed. We do our best to ensure that our personnel are trained and knowledgeable and strive to continue the education process. So how do we capture the last part? How do we make our service “humanly satisfying and pleasurable”? The answer is simple: Communicate.

We must communicate with our customers in a timely manner.
We must sincerely care about their issues.
We must instill confidence that we will take care of their issues quickly and correctly.
We must at all times show respect and courtesy even when customers demonstrate their frustration.

I don’t expect us to take verbal abuse, but you must be able to quickly defuse the situation or remove yourself and re-approach it at a later time. We must maintain our professionalism at all times even if we are ending the relationship.

The day our customers become an inconvenience is the day you may need to find another career path. So at this point I wish to look at ourselves as an organization and determine if we are consistently providing “unsurpassed customer service”. Our mission statement says we will, so we must constantly evaluate our performance. If we become the harshest of critics on ourselves then our customers won’t be. I would appreciate feedback and comments.

We can only get better if we keep raising the bar!

Thank You,

David Cooksey

Talk Radio Inspiration

It seems that lately we are hearing a lot about how things are tough and are going to get worse. I don’t necessarily disagree but the rhetoric is wearing on me. That being said I heard something on the radio that struck a real chord with me. I really don’t remember exactly who or what was being discussed but the comment really resonated with me. The speaker made this comment.

“You can let things happen to you or you can make things happen for you.”

A simple statement, but it stuck with me. I started looking for what I was doing to make things happen. Things like our business plans for 2009, my own leadership plan as well as my life plan. These are actions that can “Make things happen for me.” I just need to make the choice everyday to stay on task and ensure that the plans are being followed. We make the choice everyday on whether we will be successful or not. We make the choice everyday to “Let things happen to us or make things happen for us.”