Customer Service for Law Enforcement
Author: Tay Jones - Owner/Consultant, Law Enforcement Product SOlutions
Customer service is a huge part of committing law enforcement. Although your community and those you deal with daily aren’t typically looked at through a customer lens, make no mistake, they are your customers. These people and businesses are who you exist for, and who you should be providing the best possible service to.
Thinking of your community, and the people and businesses within it as customers, makes it easy to conceptualize the task at hand.
In law enforcement, providing service from a customer service perspective makes sense. It’s a concept most can understand and wrap their heads around; it’s a task most have been involved in, in one way or another, at different levels throughout their lives.
In business, service is the great equalizer. If you provide poor service, you’ll have no customers; once you have no customers, you have no business. Law enforcement, however, unlike many businesses, has a moral responsibility to provide great service. Why? Because in law enforcement, your customers support you and pay your bills whether they like your service or not. It’s called taxes.
In law enforcement, you don’t go out of business when your juice isn’t worth the squeeze. No matter your level of service, life goes on.
Have you earned it? Do you continue to earn your customers’ dollars through consistent effort and positive results?
If some wheels started to turn while you read that, good – that was the point. If questions about your police agency’s level of service began to occupy your mind, great – that shows you and your agency care.
I have no doubt that your police organization has felt pressure to better serve your community. I think they all have. The real question is: how?
Serving customers can be very subjective, especially in law enforcement. And contrary to what a lot of people consider customer service, it is more than a smile and a handshake.
Can you define your customers? They aren’t just your community.
Can you describe how you’re showing up for your customers in all four areas of service? Even more importantly, do you know what the four areas of service are to even begin to describe how you’re showing up within them?
There are a lot of misconceptions when it comes to customer service. It encapsulates more than most realize. Customer service is serving your customers in all aspects, and what is traditionally thought of as the sum of customer service, is only one part of the equation.
Law Enforcement Product Solutions’ four-part, Touchpoint Method™ framework brings traditional views of customer service together with all other aspects, creating a wholistic approach from which you can assess where you’re at in these four areas and begin to strategize and improve on your current position.
This can be a daunting task.
If you are a police chief, sheriff, or other command level, law enforcement leader, and would like your police agency to better understand these concepts, learn more about our Customer Service for Law Enforcement training.
You can’t do it all yourself, but we can do it together.
With you
For you
Together