Shane CoShane Co. was recently honored with the Bride’s Choice Award for 2011 by the nationally acclaimed wedding website, WeddingWire.com. While we have won many awards over the 40 years that we’ve been in business, this one is especially near and dear to my heart, solely for the reason that the awards were based on customer reviews, and that alone.
Customer service is something that we not only pride ourselves on, but something that we find most difficult to achieve consistently. What I mean by that is that everything else in a business seems to be able to be systematized and controlled, where perfect customer service is something that always seems to be just out of reach, keeping us forever trying to improve upon it.
Our accounting procedures are systemic by nature. If the debits equal the credits at the end of each month, we’re in good shape. We monitor all Information Technology to ensure that all systems are online and the company’s computers are kept running. Our merchandise processing team is as consistent as a well-oiled machine, and careful measures are in place to ensure that manufacturing bottlenecks are addressed and corrected immediately with the team, ensuring maximum efficiencies.
Customer service, however, is an elusive thing. Not only are we dealing with people, not systems, but on the other side of the showcase is our customer. Each customer has their own likes and dislikes. Each person is unique in his or her own right. It is these nuances, these subtleties, which keeps the target of perfecting customer service forever out of reach. Accordingly, it is exactly this that keeps our sales associates constantly on their toes, never having a split second for complacency, always adjusting on the fly to try to deliver a perfect experience to each and every customer.
The efforts and importance that we as a company place on customer service, and the difficulty in achieving a mediocre score from a group of customers, much less one of praise, one that is award-worthy, is why I am proud to have won the award that we did. Out of over 600 reviews, on the topics of Quality of Service and Professionalism, we averaged a rating of 4.7 out of 5, on both of our WeddingWire accounts. The .2 rating keeping us away from the 5.0 score is the difference between where we are today, and where we strive to be tomorrow.
