Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1499197
18 PCB007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2023 breathe customer service. Everyone should be staying up nights trying to figure out how to deliver the best possible customer experience on the market today, and the company leader should be personally leading that charge. Remember that when customers judge how you treat them, you are not only competing against other board shops. You are also com- peting against the best customer service com- panies in the world, including Disney, L.L. Bean, Tiffany & Co. and Nordstrom. at's a lot of pressure! Yes, great customer service comes from the top and filters all the way through the organiza- tion. But please be careful, because that sword cuts both ways. As the leader of a company, you have to make sure that at no time will you ever bad-mouth a customer. If you get angry Dan Beaulieu has been an I-Connect007 col- umnist for at least 12 years. His weekly col- umns, now almost 800 of them, cover sales, marketing, business development and cus- tomer service, among others. ey are a trea- sure trove of thoughtful commentary; he truly is an expert on customer service in the printed circuit board industry. For this issue, we asked Dan to choose his five favorite columns on customer service. If you're new to Dan's columns, you'll see that he doesn't mince words. He tells it like he sees it—sometimes that's pretty, and other times it's not. But it's always valuable advice. We've excerpted his top picks here. Click on the icon next to the title to read the full column. Customer Service Starts at the Top All customer service starts at the top. It's a cul- tural thing. To have great customer service, you have to have respect for your customers. Every- one in the company, not just the customer ser- vice people, has to respect the customer. Look, it's easy to pass everything along to the customer ser vice people. (By the way, when I say customer ser vice people I also mean inside sales people because I have found that in our industr y, these terms are pretty much interchangeable.) So, for the record here, if a company wants to have great customer service, everyone in the company— the owner, the president, the sales manager, the plating supervisor, the maintenance per- son, the people in shipping, and the customer service person—must be completely focused on the customer. Everyone must live, eat, and Dan Beaulieu's Five Favorite Columns on Customer Service Dan Beaulieu AN I-CONNECT007 COMPILATION