Four Foundations of Effective Catalog Customer Service

1. Employees truly must care about customers. Employees pick up their customer service cues from management. If your employees don't care about your customers it may be because you haven't made caring for customers an unmistakable priority or rewarded your staffers for doing so.

2. Staffers must be free to develop creative solutions for customers with problems. If you punish employees for thinking outside of the box, says Schiffman, you can't expect them to deliver extraordinary customer service in difficult situations. Empower your people (within reasonable limits, of course) with enough authority to deal with tough and unforeseen circumstances in a way that keeps customers happy.