Read this nice article in NY Times today. It highlights how there must be a service level priority and understanding, amongst employees to treat customers and their requests. Many a times, I feel the inability to understand this, leads to service dissatisfaction in organizations. The intent might be there with the employee but some times urgency & initiative will make a big difference in the customer's mind about how the company addresses her/his problem. There has to be right balance between ideal( solution) vs immediate action. May be 'sensitizing' this difference to employees will help. Take a look:
For service businesses, “customers aren’t simply the open wallet at the end of an efficient supply chain,” writes Frances X. Frei, a Harvard Business School professor. “They’re directly involved in operations. The fact that they introduce tremendous variability, but complain about any lack of consistency, is an everyday reality.”
....writing in the Harvard Business Review, Ms. Frei says the strategy does not have to be as blunt as either/or.
She argues that there are five distinct parts of any service transaction: When the customer arrives; makes a request of some kind; participates in the interaction (describes the symptoms to a physician, for example); decides how much to participate in the transaction (“an internal accountant may or may not take care to hand over well-organized files to her company’s independent auditor”); and judges how well she or he has been treated.
At each point, a company can choose to offer four levels of care, with fabulous service on the one end and self-service on the other, Ms. Frei writes. The secret to maximizing profit, she writes, is to choose the right level of service at each of the five points, recognizing that you may be able to vary it at each one.