David Freemantle quoted: Feelings have a critical role in the way customers are influenced. Have you noticed that you learn best when you examine the work and results of others? We certainly feel you do. In this article, we will examine customer support in three great customer service cases.
All of these offer some excellent points you can apply to your business that will help amplify your marketing.
I’ve been with the same dentist for more than 15 years. He’s friendly, personal, and generally on time with his service schedule. I have considerable confidence in his abilities and he had my business loyalty, at least until now.
He does what I expect a dentist to do and he does it explaining all the issues and options without having to play 20 questions with him.
For that reason, I never thought about considering a change in service providers.
Then one day my wife and I started spending our winters in Florida. And now the option of finding a Florida dentist became a necessity.
The new dentist changed my entire perspective on the service expectations that I had developed over the past 15 years.
This new dentist was younger and surely ‘less experienced’. But it didn’t seem this way.
He was much more personal, asked important questions, spent more time with me, and did a more thorough job.
That experience opened my eyes to the quality differences with my current dentist.
I had come to expect quality and service that was very good. But the new dentist provided something even better.
Now every time I am in need of standard dentist action, such as an annual checkup, etc., I plan my appointments for our time in Florida. The Florida doctor has won my standard business.
The business lesson here?
If you are any type of service provider, never become complacent. Don’t provide a standard, average or just good enough service.
Always look for ways to continuously improve your service and do things better.
Because the day someone provides better results, service, or quality than you do, is the day your customers’ loyalty will dry up.
Left unchanged and not corrected so too may your business.
Customer support services … case 2 Disney World
Ever been to Disney World? With most of our family living 50 miles away, we often felt like tour guides. Not a bad thing though.
Lots of any business can learn from Disney’s customer experience design and operations. A real difference maker.
Disney puts a tremendous amount of attention to its parks’ customer immersion and customer experience; in fact, one could say the Disney theme park mystique is 100% about immersing the customer in the culture of Disney movies and character history.
Over 150,000 employees are employed ‘on stage’ each day at Disney parks to help create this customer experience immersion.
What are the ways Disney uses its park designs and ‘on stage’ employees to create the best possible customer experience?
Consider Disney’s explicit operations and design principles:
Care for customers
In front of nearly every ride was stroller parking and in the Magic Kingdom, there were plenty of strollers because nearly every group had some small children.
There were areas set aside for stroller parking, and clear instructions for where to park your stroller.
Guess what? Customers still managed to ignore them.
In most places, this might create chaos. Not at Disney, where they have a ‘stroller guy’ whose entire job it was to pick up after lazy customers.
We have seen them organize strollers into lines, put errant Sippy cups back into cup holders, and keep his little area of the park neat and organized.
All customer-facing employees are responsible for ensuring parks remain clean, friendly, organized, and most of all, fun.
Immerse customers in the brand
At Disney, you can’t look in any direction without seeing the Disney branding all around.
In the park, it works to surround you with the Disney experience at every moment, even when some parts of the park are under construction.
Not to mention the side benefit of Disney likely negotiating some discount on the construction work from businesses in exchange for allowing them to put their brand on the signage seen by millions of park customers.
Related post: The Story of How JetBlue Turns Customers into Advocates
Lots of help and directions
All stage employees are encouraged to be ‘assertively friendly’. They are to seek out those who look like they need help, before they come looking for help.
The parks at Disney are very large and directions can be confusing. The last thing customers need is to not be able to find what they are looking for.
As a result, signs have to be super easy to navigate and offer simple ways to get from one place to another. Disney does a great job keeping their signs easy to understand.
They also have logical layouts for parks and plenty of places to pick up copies of maps as you’re walking around their parks.
Random acts of kindness
Each employee is encouraged to offer random acts of kindness often.
The Fast Pass system at Disney is a work of analytical art that is designed to keep people moving through attractions faster and in a more optimized way.
To use it, you just insert your own park ticket and the Fast Pass will give you a specific time to return to a ride in order to board it without a wait.
Only one active at any one time however. At several, you also got the unexpected surprise of a bonus ticket to a nearby (and usually less popular) ride.
Thanks to this bonus ticket, you had the chance to ride an extra ride in the same time and feel just a little better about your experience all day.
A random act of kindness that costs nothing.
Be flexible with rules
Many of the rides take photos of you while you are on board. Those photos are sold to riders after the ride, a classic amusement park upselling technique.
At Disney, they show you the images and put a person below those images just standing by to answer questions.
Of course, some people will just take a cell phone photo of their image instead of buying one. Many places would put up big signs preventing that.
Disney, instead, puts a person there working under the photos to make it a little more socially awkward to take a photo of your photo, but they don’t outlaw it.
The result is that they probably still get a high percentage of people buying the photo who really want it.
They don’t need to have the typical rule outlawing the inevitable group of people who are happy with a lower quality photo they take themselves.
Educating while entertaining
Many places in all the parks Disney provides educational material on signs around the parks.
This is particularly true in EPCOT and the Animal Kingdom, and special events like the annual garden show at EPCOT.
Can’t be too much of this in our opinion.
Customer service cases … offer reassurance
Everyone ‘on the stage’ has a cast role, and as such, is responsible to contribute to the positive customer experience by being as helpful and assuring as possible.
When we traveled to Australia, we frequently ran into the expression of a ‘nervous nelly’ used to represent a timid or always apprehensive person.
We all know people like that. They check a map constantly even when they are going the right way, and usually find a reason to worry about something.
Disney does a great job of making sure those people feel at ease, with plenty of places and people to answer questions.
Show ready
Each customer facing employee is expected to be ‘show ready’ whenever they are on stage. Everyone has a part to play as a component of the show.
On stage, the show is on and everyone follows costume and customer interface guidelines.
Breaks and relaxing are ONLY allowed in areas unavailable to guests.
Disney certainly knows all there is to know about customer immersion and customer experience, don’t they?
It’s a culture handed down by Walt himself.
Companies that are proactively managing all elements of their customer experiences are most successful in achieving customer loyalty.
It is awesome marketing isn’t it.
Customer service cases … case 3 Marriott Courtyard
I stayed in a new Marriott Courtyard hotel a while back. The situation was that it was recently opened and should not have been opened until the problems were worked out and management was ready.
There were many problems, believe me, and it started as a significant customer failure.
But not only did the staff take care of the issues for me, the manager, once he got me back to ‘even’, continued to build the relationship with me.
His techniques included exceptional, personalized service, using my name in face-to-face greetings, and continued follow-up and attention to detail.
He actually made me believe I was the best customer he had ever had. Not only did I forget about the earlier problems, but I was feeling great about the entire three-day experience.
Customer support.
Service recovery requires remaining with your customer, through follow-up, and through unexpected contact well after the issue.
All customers deserve our best service, but the ones that have a negative experience represent an opportunity to define a business.
Such an opportunity represents an opportunity to turn customers into enthusiasts and maybe even advocates. And that requires going beyond the ‘break-even’ point for that customer.
Research has shown time and time again that customers who reported a problem and were delighted with the outcome have higher satisfaction with the business than the ones who never experienced a problem.
So these results show the importance of turning customer failure into full customer recovery.
Why should any company not want to seize such a great marketing opportunity?
Try it … the next time you have a customer who has had a back experience with your business. You will be amazed at the results.
Need some help in building better customer insights from your customer engagement? Creative ideas to help grow your customer base?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job of growing customer insights and pay for results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new insights that you have learned.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
Check out these additional articles on customer service insights from our library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Frederick the Great once said: It is pardonable to be defeated but never to be surprised. Frederick was not talking about customer service, was he? But this quote could very well apply to a service recovery plan, yes? Except we might argue that a defeat is as bad as a surprise.
Read on: How to Build Trust to Keep Customers Returning
Be prepared is the motto of the Boy Scouts. Also applies to just about everything else we do in life.
Does your customer service prepare for contingencies? Contingencies and strategy designs for when things don’t go as planned?
We’ll use a story to explain.
A story about poor customer service and a resulting bad customer experience at a restaurant. A large group of business people had arranged to get together for lunch to celebrate a colleague’s birthday. They chose a restaurant that they hadn’t been to before, as they wanted to give it a try. Plans and reservations for the group of 25 people were made several days in advance.
Arrival at the restaurant was on time. However, despite having made the reservation, they had to wait 20 minutes before they could be seated. Once seated and menus had been handed out, the group was ignored. Everyone was hungry and ready to order. They also had a limited amount of time before everyone needed to head back to work.
A waitress finally arrived to take everyone’s order.
Disaster recovery plan checklist.
After waiting for longer than seemed necessary, and observing other tables get their meals ahead of theirs, the group’s meals arrived. EXCEPT ONE, for the meal ordered by the birthday guest. He didn’t receive his meal until most of the others were finished.
A complaint was lodged with the manager, with no success. He was totally indifferent to the situation. He offered no apology and, after being asked to comp that meal, refused to do so.
This bad experience triggered one of the group to write a letter to the head office of the restaurant chain. They detailed the experience and mentioned that in addition to the 25 customers they had lost directly — everyone would tell their friends they would not recommend visiting that restaurant as well.
Ultimately, that meant more customers that would be lost.
A few days later my colleague received a letter of apology in the mail and a $40 gift card.
However, they couldn’t find anyone willing to return to the restaurant to use it due to that bad experience.
Recovery plan … Key Takeaways
First of all, bad things happen in every business. But good preparation can usually eliminate most of them. For example, you need to decide how large of a group you can handle on top of your normal crowd.
If you can’t handle a group of 25 with your normal great service, then you owe it to the potential customers to let them know what extra wait time would be required. Or, just apologize and don’t accept the reservations. The key to keeping customers happy is through honest communication, being accountable for the poor experience, and being prepared to deliver what you promise.
Then, if things go wrong, you should have service recovery strategies in place, with everyone prepared and empowered to act. Prepared and empowered to make things right — on the spot. Research tells us that when we fix a problem on the spot that loyalty actually increases more than if the customer is simply satisfied.
Try and be prepared.
So rather than seeing a complaining customer as a problem — start seeing them as an opportunity to demonstrate your service recovery strategies as a way to build loyalty.
For example, if there was to be a delay in the preparation of meals, then the customer needs to be informed. Informed ahead of time. Offering something to help address the situation also helps — in this case perhaps a basket of bread or something else could have been offered while they were kept waiting.
In this case, the effort was too little and way too late. They couldn’t regain the trust of the customers they lost through one bad experience. And unhappy customers tell everyone. Not good for any business.
The key is to take steps to rectify the problem quickly — instead of ignoring it.
A simple reminder … we all know it’s easier to keep existing customers than to find new ones.
Do you have a customer service experience to share with this community?
Need some help in building better customer service for your customers? Have you noticed the growing importance from customer service you provide, especially for your marketing? Creative ideas to help enhance your word of mouth marketing?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your customer service improvement and pay for results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas for your service to customers.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on customer service from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Stunning Customer Service Lessons and Their Examples
10 Guarantees of Poor Customer Service
Best Buy Lessons in Customer Service
Like this short blog?Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.
I stayed in a new hotel in Ohio a while back. The situation was that it was recently opened and should not have been opened until the problems were worked out and management was ready. There were many problems with customer churn, believe me.
Remember this: How to Build Trust to Keep Customers Returning
But not only did the staff take care of the issues for me, the manager, once he got me back to ‘even’, continued to build the relationship with me. His techniques included exceptional, personalized service – using my name in face-to-face greetings, and continued follow-up and attention to detail. He actually made me believe I was the best customer he had ever had. Not only did I forget about the earlier problems, but I was feeling great about the entire three-day experience.
Service recovery requires remaining with your customer, through follow-up, and through unexpected contact well after the issue. All customers deserve our best service … but the ones that have a negative experience represent an opportunity to define a business.
Such an opportunity represents an opportunity to turn customers into enthusiasts and maybe even advocates. And that requires going beyond the ‘break-even’ point for that customer.
Research has shown time and time again that customers who reported a problem and were delighted with the outcome have higher satisfaction with the business than the ones who never experienced a problem.
Why should any company not want to seize such an opportunity?
Try it … the next time you have a customer who has had a back experience with your business.
Need some help in reducing customer churn and building better customer service for your customers? Have you noticed the growing importance from customer service you provide, especially for your marketing? Creative ideas to help enhance your word of mouth marketing?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your customer service improvement and pay for results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas for your service to customers.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on customer service from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Stunning Customer Service Lessons and Their Examples
10 Guarantees of Poor Customer Service
Best Buy Lessons in Customer Service
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
The influence you have on others can be way beyond what you imagined. Is customer service performance a top priority for your company? We all know that providing exceptional customer service is the stated goal of every business leader, regardless of how large or small the company. It’s common knowledge that customers are more loyal to companies who treat them as more than just a number. So it is no surprise that businesses are turning to ways to keep customers returning, including improving the customer service recovery strategy.
What works best for customer service design in your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? Be the one who starts a conversation.
Customer service quality is no longer an emerging trend to merely keep an eye on – it’s a burgeoning movement that companies would be very wise to embrace.
Instead of returning to a store or calling a helpline, people are increasingly turning to social media to resolve their gripes. It is called social customer care.
Sadly, the personal touch customers want — and deserve — is often lost in the daily grind of doing business… especially in larger companies. Too often the leaders do not model the very behaviors they expect from their teams.
Here are five simple ways to keep your customers coming back, even after facing their problems or complaints:
Service recovery examples.
Be genuine
Your best action is to be genuine and to personalize the conversation. When a customer calls with a complaint or a concern, make the time to treat them like an individual.
And ensure your employees do, too. While calling a customer ma’am or sir is respectful, it doesn’t offer a personal touch. Replying, “Yes sir, I understand,” is polite. And polite is certainly good. But adding the customer’s name is so much better!
Using a customer’s name whenever possible helps her see you are truly engaged in serving her, regardless of the problems she’s brought to your attention.
And it helps her realize she’s more important to your company than in her checkbook.
Customer service recovery strategy … be accountable
One of the most aggravating things a customer faces where customer care is concerned is being passed around like an old hat that no one wants.
Impeccable service ensures that every company employee, regardless of rank, handles customers to the fullest extent of their abilities.
Never refer a customer to someone else simply because you don’t know how to handle his problem. Instead, take the time to help him fix the problem, if possible.
Or at the least, if you must refer a customer, find someone who can resolve their issue and provide a warm hand-off.
Ensuring your customer achieves a desirable outcome will create a customer for life.
Service recovery steps … be empathetic
Listen, acknowledge, validate & apologize to your customers when there is an issue. Sometimes people really do just need to vent, and rarely should a complaint be taken personally. Learn to acknowledge the customer’s issue, and train employees to do the same.
It helps your customer to know that someone understands their concerns. Let them know you understand the way they are feeling and apologize even if you don’t feel you need to.
A sincere apology works wonders in creating happy, loyal customers, and confirms your willingness to take responsibility for the customer’s problem.
Be innovative
Once you understand the customer’s problem, offer legitimate solutions. Avoid telling the customer what you can’t do, at all costs. Instead, focus on what you can do to remedy her situation, and offer some options.
Working to solve your customer’s problem — even if not to the extent they may have hoped — will help her feel as if you care about her and her business.
A solution-focused attitude will keep customers coming back even after they’ve faced a problem with your company.
Be trustworthy
Being trustworthy means you never make impossible promises. You know the ones you can’t keep. Often, in an effort to appease a customer, an employee or company leader will make promises that are not only impractical but which he or she is simply not able to honor.
Instead, offer a realistic, workable solution that will allow you to rebuild your customer relationship and provide some satisfaction. It’s not necessary to ‘give away the farm’. Just meet the situation realistically and your customer will appreciate the effort.
Takeaways
While these tips will help you provide quality care to your customers, there will be times when nothing anyone else does will be enough to keep a customer.
Knowing you’ve offered impeccable service, however, will help you sleep better at night realizing there was nothing more you could have done to meet the customer’s needs.
Need some help in building better customer service for your customers? Have you noticed the growing importance of customer service you provide, especially for your marketing? Creative ideas to help enhance your word of mouth marketing?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas for your service to customers.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on customer service from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
