Provide REAL Great Customer Service!
Customer service in America is horrible at best since great customer service is missing with so many organizations. It doesn’t have to be this way.
A few years ago I had the enlightening opportunity to have Don Gallegos come speak to our company here in Utah and he talked about great customer service. Don has a book entitled “Win the Customer, Not the Argument” which is the best customer service eye-opening book I’ve ever read. At the heart, is the topic of what is great customer service? What do you customers define as great customer service? How does your organization deliver great customer service?
Your boss, the customer, cares about great customer service
I’ve made “Win the Customer, Not the Argument” the only required reading for employees at work.
Great customer service means navigating through the potential problems of doing business while delivering an exceptional customer service experience. You can avoid a poor customer experience, by creating a customer-focused culture with:
- Great customer service quotes
- Great customer service stories
- Great customer service examples
- Great customer service skills trainings
All of these are sources of inspiration to any team that desires to set themselves apart form the competition and deliver great customer service.
Why are companies always establishing new policies that annoy or anger 99.8% of its customers to take care of the .2% or less sometimes of those that may be the offender? Don’t you know that you have to take care of your 99% plus customer base or they’ll go elsewhere?
Excellent customer service is the greatest way to show your customers you value their decision to choose you. Delivering great customer service is one of the most effective ways to protect your customer base. Companies with great customer service understand that without the customer, they’re out of business.
Pay it forward with great customer service
We all want to receive the best customer service. But corporate America doesn’t believe it. It’s clear that they believe that customers won’t go elsewhere, so they continue to promote bad customer service, because it’s easy and cheap. But you have the power to break the bad service experience cycle.
When you receive great customer service, make it known. Tell your family, friends, shout it from the social media roof tops! Let the organization you worked with know how much you appreciated the great customer service experience you received. It makes a difference.
What is great customer service?
If you’re in the business of customers (aren’t we all?) Here are a few suggestions to offering REAL great customer service, not the customer dis-service that we’re currently receiving from the corporate giants:
- If your phone system message always says that you’re “experiencing an unusually high volume of calls”, it’s not unusual unless you’re the IRS and it’s April 15. Either hire more people or get rid of the message, it’s insulting.
- Actually respond, and respond quickly to emails and chats. Give customers the attention that is needed to quickly resolve the problem.
- Requiring a receipt for a return is ludicrous. You have complex systems for tracking inventory, stocking, pricing, serials, etc. yet for me to return something I need to prove that it came from you by showing you a receipt? Please.
- I didn’t need to show a driver’s license to buy it. Why do I need to show it to return it?
- When a customer is frustrated over chat or just isn’t getting it, sometimes it helps to give them a call.
- Don’t feel restricted by policies. If a customer wants a refund after 40 days (10 days past our 30 day refund deadline), just give it to them.
- If a customer is upset, forget the policies. Give them a full refund. Give them something extra. Send them a free gift.
- If a customer is angry that the product doesn’t work like they thought it would (even if it is a known incompatibility), replace it, better yet give them a new product that works free.
- If a customer goes out of their way to write an email and thank us, send them a package with something free.
Winning customer loyalty centers on the idea that your customers are not just the customers from the moment they walk in the door to your business or visit your Web site, etc. It’ll take fantastically great customer service to keep them working with you.
They are the customer 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They are always the customer. Companies have started to treat people as one time customers, and not as life-long customers. People are loyal to themselves first and if you don’t take care of them, they will go elsewhere. Great customer service is the greatest answer your customers can give to a competitor trying to steal them away.
Remember:
- People don’t know great customer service until they get it. When they receive good service they think, “Wow!” and make the choice to switch to the new service provider.
- The customer is NOT always right, but they are ALWAYS the customer.
- Don’t take the easy way out and say NO, find a way to say YES.
- Don’t hide behind a policy, do what’s right.
- 99.6% of the customer were good compared to those that were bad, why create policies to hurt those good customers?
- Nordstroms once took back and refunded a pair of tires. Nordstroms doesn’t even sell tires. They won that customer.
- Just because we make a special situation for one person, doesn’t mean that everyone else will want that too! Make that customer happy.
Bad customer service doesn’t have to be the standard, but we have to make it our mission to deliver great customer service that creates an exceptional customer experience.
In general, I agree: Policies are often written to prevent a very small number of customers from taking advantage of companies in some way. Any time I hear “we can’t” from a customer service person, I know that they work for a company that has a somewhat adversarial perspective. But there are some major companies (LL Bean, American Express, and Zappos, for example) who take service seriously, and who have made the customer the focus. Dealing with small companies, especially those that are locally owned, is usually a very pleasant experience.
To paint companies with the broad “in America” brush is doing in reverse what companies with bad policies do to customers. The best tactic I’ve personally found is to vote with your wallet, rewarding companies who serve you well, and making a point of letting them–and my friends–know why I choose to do business there.
Thanks for thinking about customer service!
Roy
Great point Roy! I hope that more and more organizations realize that it’s their level of service and being able to connect with the customer that will keep them relevant in the future.
The millennial generation is a new base of consumers. Millennials want to CONNECT and ENGAGE with organizations and they won’t do that if EXCEPTIONAL SERVICE isn’t offered.
Hi Flavio,
Thanks for putting together this post. Your bullet points were great. In regards to the responding to email, chat etc. a best practice is to set a SLA. I’m always surprised when I visit billion dollar brands and they don’t have many SLA’s in regards to customer service.
Thanks again.
Michel.
Great point Michel. I find it ironic that many of these billion dollar brands will require SLAs from smaller vendors for services and then just bury their own service contacts deep within their sites or push users through endless mazes of phone menus.
But SLAs are an awesome way to stay on top of service and can also be used as a marketing/feature for your service (e.g. EMAIL RESPONSES IN UNDER 1 HOUR. GUARANTEED!).
Great piece !! love it. Story about Nordstrom is that at that particular place there used to be a garage (this story is famous with coaches all over the world ;-) what a service ! Your article is written in a very american style (no bad intentions in that comment) do realise that in other countries (let alone continents) people react differently. all together.. I wish there would be a little bit more of this american mentality in my country.
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, it’s an american style from a customer experience coach in America. But as I’ve said it before, what we share is really ment to inspire us to think more about the customer experience.
Then, as we’re thinking more about customer service and customer experience, we can customize service to meet the needs and wants of customers within our individual locations with its norms and customs.
At the end of the day, it’s about thinking more about your customers, understanding them, and doing the things that will keep them coming back.
The article makes sense. But trying to convince multinationals that customer service is more important than budgets. The struggle I find is when you have your hands tied. But you can still have great service with strict policies with enthusiastic staff There’s always something you CAN do.
You can’t do it right everywhere because you’re going to need support from the top of the organization all of the way to the front-line employees. But what CAN you do?
Within the constraints that we have, create environments where employees are happy and engaged. i think of places like IKEA, my local Smith’s supermarket, where people aren’t being paid gobs of money to work there, but there’s opportunity for them to grow, learn, and develop in a caring environment. They redirect that welcoming, caring feeling to the customers (me).
I think Toby you made a very important comment there: “Enthusiastic staff”. It doesn’t matter what the company line is, or who runs the company… when a customer rings, emails, chats or walks in to a store they are usually talking to the lowest paid of your staff, and they are representing your company. Do what ever it takes but make the employees feel proud that they can deal with a grumpy unhappy customer and send them away happy! If your staff are happy and feel they have the freedom to help people, they will.
Tim
It happened in 1981. Ford had launched its trucks in India with an Indian partner. The truck had axle shaft failure due to overloading, which is very common in India. Other local manufacturers designed their vehicles for overloading. The company did not replace the axle shaft for 10 months and was fighting with customer for overloading. Ford Truck brand was dead very soon. The Ford Truck was technically the best and most advanced in its category then.
Madhavan Gopalachary