Recently, this Toronto office space blog writer had a bad customer experience waiting for a bus after a fireworks display. The fireworks were attended by thousands of people who were looking to go home after the event concluded.

As with any other major fireworks displays, traffic was bad and buses were delayed. The media encouraged people to take public transit and leave the car at home. A large number of people chose to take a bus route that was a ten-minute walk away from the central location of the fireworks display. They anticipated that the bus route that was only 30 seconds away from the fireworks would be crowded and streets would be congested. The only problem was that the transit authority had not planned for that many people to stay the extra few minutes and did not put on additional buses on the Main Street bus route in the Beaches, leaving many people stranded in the pouring rain. The regularly scheduled buses (20 minutes apart) filled up quickly and the crowd was not able to get on them.  For this writer, it took almost 2 hours to get out of the area and proceed to my home.

Upon getting home, I took to the internet to lodge a compliant with the transit authorities customer service department with a detailed account of what had occurred. Several days later, I received a reply that sounded very much like a form later that did not address the specifics of my compliant. This got me to thinking more about how customer service has become so impersonal. I also started to wonder what the difference is between quality customer service and simply trying to placate customers with apologies and promises.

After some research, I found advice that will help Telsec deliver better customer service for not only our office space tenants, but also our Toronto virtual office clients. I then realized that what I found could be be of interest to those who read our office space Toronto blog for business advice.

I decided that this week, I want to explore what customer service is and talk about the history of customer service. I want to share with our readers some information on what makes good customer service and what makes exceptional customer service.  More importantly, I want to explore with our readers the way technology has changed the way that customer service is not only handled, but also the not so obvious customer service challenges  On the flipside, I also want to look into  how good intentions can also lead to bad customer service.