5 Ultimate Mistakes that Cause Most Customer Attrition

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. My favorite Angelou quote hands down. Not written for customer experience or customer service, it certainly applies, doesn’t it? If you want to minimize your guarantees for the cause most customer attrition, you should take heed.

Check out our thoughts on customer focus.

When we work with clients on customer experience or customer service design, we always start with things not to do.

When considering why convenience has become a key differentiator, the answer is right in our faces: We all have busy lives; we’re all pulled in multiple directions all day long. Given an alternative, does anyone want less convenience or to spend more time on their to-do list? This idea isn’t really new. Corner markets and convenience stores aren’t just competing with the big-box superstores, they flourish. Why? The reason is in their names: They’re right where their customers are, and they’re convenient.

Why may you ask? Simple. For every bad experience we create for customers, we need to create anywhere from 5-10 experiences just to break even. Customers remember the bad easier than the good.

With the advent of the Internet, the number of marketing options available to both budding and experienced entrepreneurs has become staggering.

Related: Simplify Customers Lives for Remarkable Experiences

When it comes to running our companies, we all get into a rut from time to time. One big weakness is not having enough time in the day to assess all of the ways our customers are interacting with us, whether it’s digital or good old face-to-face.

With all the access customers have to products and services other than your own, it’s extremely easy to lose opportunities to make them happy.

Take a look at your business and see if any of these bad experiences may be losing your customers:

Most customer attrition … employees ignoring customers

How many times have you walked into a store and you find employees hard at work doing store tasks? An easy way for them to ignore you, isn’t it? How about when you find them talking to each other about their shifts or, worse yet, about the fact that they hate working today?

It happens more often than you think. Your customers want a pleasant and positive experience with your business, and they want to be noticed and quickly engaged with … not ignored. Let your employees know that customer attention and engagement is their number one priority. They should save store work and idle chit-chat for when customers aren’t around.

Telephone handoffs

Have you ever called your business phone number to see what the customer experience is like? I do it all the time.

If your phone tree has lots of branches and a complex menu, your customers or prospects can’t get someone to talk to in a quick and easy fashion; you could lose them forever. It is one of my biggest pet peeves.

Don’t greet your customers on the phone with the “Please listen to the following as our menu has changed” message. That takes a solid five seconds that a customer could be in touch with you faster.

Also, assess what most of the calls coming in are concerning. If they’re usually on a specific topic, then that should be the “Press one for … ” option. Never hesitate to change your phone tree.

Telephone etiquette

Have you ever had to wait for someone to get off his/her mobile device before helping you? Likewise, had an employee answer the phone while waiting on you? Think of a customer coming into your business and experiencing the same. Nothing can be more frustrating and rude.

I’ve been at a restaurant and waited for 10 minutes before I was asked if I wanted a menu simply because the wait staff was updating Facebook. And it doesn’t only happen at retail locations; it happens in the office environment, too.

At my small business marketing agency, Digital Spark Marketing, our employees always used to have their laptops on or type away on their mobile devices during meetings. Nothing worse and had to be curbed; no matter how good you are at multi-tasking, you’re going to miss something important if you’re typing away.

It shows a lack of respect for your customers or co-workers and it says to them that whatever’s happening on your phone or laptop is more important than everyone else’s time. And time is one of life’s most important assets.

Your employees need to put customers first, before texting and social media, and if they want to do those things, then it should be during their time.

reasons for losing customers — **Reasons for losing customers?**

Customer attrition analysis … feel welcome?

Have you ever walked into an office and had no one pay attention to you? Or ever shopped at a store and no one asked if you needed help? My husband walked into a local store, shopped for an item for about 10 minutes and none of the four employees (who weren’t busy) asked if he needed help.

He then brought his purchase to the counter and gave the check-out person his credit card. The entire transaction happened without a word. Really? No feelings of being welcomed here, is there?

Many retail businesses make it someone’s job to welcome people into the store. Restaurants have hosts that greet you and get you seated. All businesses, not just retail, need to have some way of knowing when a visitor has arrived.

Make sure you and your people are smiling and welcoming newcomers into your place of business; you never know who they might be.

Losing customers … inconsistencies

If you’re a customer, and you like to frequent a particular business, you expect a certain level of performance that you’ve grown accustomed to, whether it be a website that works well or the quality of a meal at a restaurant.

If you think you have the best pizza in New York, it better to be the best pizza every single time you serve it.

If your customer service is outstanding, all of your customers need to experience that outstanding service each and every time. Remember that your repeat customers are telling your new prospects about their experience, so make sure it’s always the same stellar experience or it won’t be talked about.

The bottom live

You can’t neglect your customer experience if you want them to stay with or recommend your business.

Remember, customers create the most value for you … when you create the most value for them.

Here’s the thing, customer experience isn’t just a new way of marketing, it’s a new way of running a business isn’t it? Many businesses certainly have figured this out and are using social marketing and improved customer experience to grow their business rapidly.

Practices that are proactively managing all elements of their customer experiences are most successful in achieving customer loyalty.

Do you have a lesson about improving your customer focus you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.

It’s up to you to keep improving your customer attention and focus. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas to make your customer experiences better.

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 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.

Verizon Customer Service Standards Often Miss the Mark

Brands are verbs. What they do matters more than what they say. Verizon customer service standards are part of the brand’s deal.

Verizon's customer service standards — **Verizon Customer service standards.**

Verizon customer service. Do you pay more attention to what brands do than what they say they will or should do?

Think carefully about your last few experiences with brands. While you gather your thoughts, let me tell you about a terrible Verizon customer service standards experience that my wife and I recently went through.

Check out our thoughts on customer focus.

Have you ever visited a Verizon store? Hopefully, it was a better visit than ours. Perhaps it will stimulate your thinking about your recent customer experiences.

My wife has had her ‘flip’ phone for almost a decade. Her display has been badly cracked for the better part of a year, so our daughter purchased her a new flip phone for her birthday. She refused to try a smartphone.

Related: 7 Ways to Create a Customer Service Evangelist Business

So before I tell you about our experience at Verizon where we went to get the phone activated, let me ask you a question. How long should it take to activate a simple flip phone, do you think?

You probably won’t believe the answer. Over an hour and there were no customers in the store when we arrived. That should be a clue of how bad the service and experience was, yes?

Here are the problems we experienced and what Verizon should have improved on:

Customer service standards … excessive time to accomplish the task

Ok, I have already told you that it took over an hour to activate a simple flip phone.

But I didn’t tell you that the service representative could not even complete the task. More on that following. That is amazing.

customer service standards — **Customer service standards.**

Service representative not knowledgeable

Over an hour with the service representative, four calls to Verizon and two visits to the other service representative in the store, and he did not finish the task.

Need I say more about his knowledge of the Verizon products?

Customer service standards … service or sales?

I have said that we were there in the store to get my wife’s new phone activated. We already selected and had the new Verizon phone when we arrived.

That did not stop the service representative from trying to sell us other products and cell phone packages on four occasions during the service visit.

Made it our problem

We did not bring our USB cord with us, as we did not think we needed it. The store could not find one for this phone.

This became the source of all the activation issues experienced during the visit.

Do you have a screwdriver?

When the visit started, the service representative needed to remove the battery, which apparently required the use of a screwdriver.

He asked my wife if she had one with her. Double amazing, yes?

No store teamwork

When we arrived at the store, there were no customers present and two customer service representatives. The representative that helped us was a stand-in from a store 80 miles away.

Neither representative knew each other nor the second one was not very supportive in helping in finding a solution to the difficulties his store mate was having (even though he was not busy with any customers for the first 15 minutes).

Never completed job

As we have previously said the service representative never completed his task.

He didn’t think he had transferred the contacts from the old phone, and he could not figure out how to back up the phone.

Good thing he gave up on the contact transfer, as when we got home we discovered there were three copies of each old contact in the new phone.

Very anxious to move to next customer

As you can imagine, after about 30 minutes trying to finish our job, there were 3-4 customers waiting for service. That put everyone even more on edge.

The service representative became even more anxious to move on to the next customer. Not a good scene.

The bottom line

What’s missing is the concept of service. The desire to help clients achieve their goals rather than to assume you know what their goals should be. Talk about direct response metrics won’t help a client whose brand awareness is trailing by ten points.

Interestingly, top digital players like Yahoo! and Google do understand this. However, many in the industry are still the same arrogant bunch that went down in the first dot-com boom and will surely go down again, screaming “nobody gets it!” along the way.

It is amazing to my wife and me how many issues in customer service we experienced that day. Not hard to understand why we would classify this one of our worst customer experiences in a very long time.

Do you have a lesson about crafting your customer service and or experience better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Need some help in building better customer service for your customers? Have you noticed the growing importance of the service you provide? 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?

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 him on 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.

Make Your Service Something Your Customers Won’t Forget

Earlier in the year, my sister was in the hospital. She had a knee replacement, a procedure she was already familiar with. So, she knew what was in the store and she was not looking forward to it. She knew customers won’t forget.

One of her concerns was the level of service in the hospital (for good reason). When you’re undergoing major surgery and recovery, there’s a lot of room for mistakes. Even if the operation is fine medically, the aftercare can make all the difference in the world.

It’s only fair here to point out that my sister, wonderful as she is, happens to be one of the world’s most demanding customers. I should know because I am too. So any hospital she chose for this surgery was going to have to be on their “A” game to win her approval.

To our surprise, she found one that passed with flying colors. They did almost everything right from start to finish. Throughout the whole situation, My sister had nothing but good things to say about the hospital and staff.

Several things about this stand out.

One is the CEO/President of the hospital. He visited my mom three times while she was recovering from surgery. He even gave her his cell phone number in case she needed anything while she was there.

I almost fell down when she told me this.

She explained. Prior to choosing a hospital, she had told her surgeon about her concerns regarding good care. Her surgeon felt Lourdes Hospital was a good choice. So (apparently) he made a call.

I have no idea whom he called or what he said. All we know is she got extremely good care and special attention from the CEO of the hospital.

The second thing that stood out was the staff. They all seemed to be caring and very skilled at their work. As I said, my sister knows what good service is. These people really impressed her. That’s not an easy thing to do.

The third thing that stands out is that the care she received matches the current advertising campaign being done by the Lourdessystem.

As my wife and I were driving home from the hospital the first night, we noticed a billboard for Lourdes. It had a picture of a friendly-looking woman (a hospital employee). The copy on the sign read:

“I am the care I give.” “I am Lourdes”

(Or something like that.)

I hate most advertising because it’s not real. Most big corporate marketing campaigns are what the company wants us to think but not what the reality is.

This was different. Finally, I thought, a company got their marketing right. They actually seem to be delivering the same level of service and care their ad campaign suggests they are.

Consistency counts.

And especially so do accuracy and honesty.

Don’t bother telling people how great you are unless you can back it up. The best marketing is what happens after you thrill someone (like having the CEO of a major hospital visit a patient).

That’s a memorable service. That’s a service that won’t be forgotten. And its what keeps your customers coming back.

Always remember:

Make sure the service you deliver is as good as or better than the service you advertise.

9 Steps to Making Your Social Customer Care the Best in Local Markets

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel..

– Maya Angelou

Customer care and retention efforts are most effective when they’re proactive, not reactive. In other words, it’s much easier to set customers up for success than to frantically rescue at-risk customers later on. Proactive customer support involves providing your customer with the necessary resources to succeed right from day one, not just when things go wrong.

Select your channels

To select your best channels you must know who your customers are and do good research. Look at the data and study trends. This will help you determine what consumers are thinking and saying, what channels are most popular, and whether you have the resources to deal with issues.

Gain customer insights

Empower your staff

Etiquette

Judge whether customers want your help and engagement before you jump in.

Prioritization

Connect multiple channels

Conversations with customers will quickly spread between channels. Businesses need to be able to monitor across multiple channels.

Choose your tools to combine an ability to both listen and engage.

Establish a listening program

Here you need to consider the terms you will monitor carefully. Pay particular attention to the mention of your brand and miscellaneous negative terms.

Over achieve expectations

Remember this simple fact. Brands are verbs. What they do matters more than what they say. Let your actions be your difference-maker.

Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.

What Little Things Small Businesses Can Do To Build Customer Relationships

Have you ever wondered why we move to the complex end of the spectrum at the beginning of solving a problem? I certainly have, especially after making the mistake myself. Looking to build customer relationships?

In the field of designing positive experiences for customer relationship building, there will certainly be many designs that will take some serious thinking. But hopefully not at the expense of the little things you can do to build customer relationships. Such as what you may ask?

The customer engagement checklist starts with a foundation of little things that, when not done well, can make the more complex customer experience design actions a moot point.

Let’s examine a checklist of these ‘little’ items that Digital Spark Marketing recommends to its clients:

Acknowledge that I am there

… as soon as possible. If you are busy with another customer, inform me you will be with me shortly.

Be personable

… smile and introduce yourself.

Know more than your customers do

… about your products and services. Always assume they have done their own homework and product research. If you don’t know, DON’T BLUFF, but do offer to do some research.

Don’t sell

… use your knowledge and experience to help customers decide.

Listen to them well

… and make sure you understand their question(s).

Help them complete their visit quickly

… and hopefully, without seeking other help, or ‘handing them off’.

Be easy to work with

… and exceed expectations whenever you can. If your business doesn’t have what the customer wants, off alternatives, including other businesses.

Be honest

… and if you don’t know say so.

Always

… do what you say (promise).

Follow through promptly

… and keep them informed until you can close.

The bottom line

These are not things that we do not already know, of course.

Yet these little things list simply reminds us of what we already know but may have forgotten. Then it is up to us to put these lessons (or reminders) into daily use through persistence and practice.

Customers … any adders to this checklist?

Businesses … do you refresh this checklist with your staff frequently?

Like this story? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

Want to learn more about Digital Spark Marketing?

Reading from Digital Spark Marketing’s library:

Six Business Lessons Learned From the Bamboo

Build an Effective Team by Being a Talent Hound

Giving Gratitude … the Story of the Entangled Whale

Tips on Preparing Your Website for the Holiday Season

The holiday season is just around the corner, and you should be preparing your website for the holiday season. It is important to plan right now on how you can maximize your website’s potential during this time.

As with everything, preparation is key to be able to pull off a winning strategy that can help your site bring about the best in itself, especially at this time of the year.

The role of a great publisher is not to predict what readers may want to read, but to help them form their opinions through strong, authoritative journalism. You win in the marketplace not by chasing readers with algorithms, but by attracting them with a superior product. Great journalism can’t be automated, because it is among the most human of endeavors.

Here are some ways on how you can prepare your WordPress site for the 2018 holiday season:

A website for the holiday season … Make Sure Your Loading Speed is Ready

One of the very important aspects that you should keep in check on your site is its loading speed. This is especially important during the holiday season when you are expecting the influx of high traffic.

You will spend a lot of effort on trying to generate traffic, and you wouldn’t want to waste all that by pushing them away just because your site is unable to accommodate all of them.

What’s worse is that if you are not pushing them away on purpose, but they do so because your site is simply taking too long to load.

Always remember, the maximum acceptable time for a site to load is 3 seconds – any more than that and you will have a lot of bounces.

That being said, make sure that your server is prepared to meet the demands over the holidays. Some of the steps that can help you deal with this is utilizing a caching solution and using a content delivery network.

This removes the need for your regular visitors to download the site again and again. It also ensures that your visitors would be loading the site from the nearest server.

Make it Festive

Dressing up your site for the holidays is a must if you are planning to take advantage of it. Multiple plugins can help you do just that and make it impressively stunning. Some of the best plugins for the holidays are the following:

Christmas Music plugin

Give your site a true Christmas feel by providing Christmas music using the dedicated plugin. Your site visitors may choose to pause and play the music with a button.

Countdown plugin

You may trigger the excitement for the holiday season by using the countdown plugin and show the number of days left before an occasion of your choice. There are also numerous ways for you to customize this countdown timer to fit your site’s design.

A website for the holiday season … Scheduled WP Themes

You will also be able to change the site’s theme on a schedule you’ll set using the scheduled theme’s plugin. By doing so, the theme can automatically change when the designated date and time occurs.

This is best when you would not be around over the holidays, but you are looking at ways on how you may be able to spice things up on your site in a unique way but at the right time.

There are many other plugins that you can check out. Just make sure that you only use plugins from a trusted source to help prevent any untoward incident that a suspicious plugin can bring about.

Plan Something Unique on the Busiest Days

It is also best to come up with some events that can help you maximize the holidays in your favor.

This means that you should consider some special events that can further entice your visitors to go to your site. This can be a sale, a giveaway on a specific day and time, or a contest.

The choice is yours. But one important thing you should keep in mind is that whatever you have in mind, this should be done on the busiest days for you so that you can maximize its benefits.

plan something unique — **Plan something unique.**

If you have been around for a while, it is best to check your performance in the previous years so that you can see which days are typically the busiest.

Your goal is to make yourself even more productive on the same day or days this year. By preparing for it, you would be able to maximize the influx of holiday traffic.

Organize and Schedule your Content

One of the attributes that can set quality content from others is timeliness. It’s always a good idea to publish content at the time when they make the most sense.

As in the case of your holiday preparations, it’s a great idea to come up with content that is appropriate for the season. There are many ways for which you can write about how the holidays relate to your site’s offerings.

But saying that you should come up with holiday-appropriate content doesn’t mean that you should create and publish them during the holidays. You can do them right now and schedule them to be published on a future date.

This ensures that no matter where you may be on the date you have in mind for publishing, it can, and it will happen. Maximize WordPress’s scheduled publishing feature.

Secure your Website

Because the holiday season is busy, there’s a lot of movement regarding money as well. That is why a lot of cyber crooks who would like to take advantage of that and would try to victimize unsuspecting sites, especially those where the money is.

However, this does not mean that blog sites and other sites that don’t directly deal with money are out of danger. All types of sites can be targeted for whatever ill reasons these cybercriminals have in mind.

To help prevent your site from being victimized from these risks, and to also protect your site’s visitors, it is best for you to heighten up your security.

Make sure that you do at least the following:

Ensure that your software and plugins are updated.

This equips your site with all the necessary updates that the WordPress team has for its users, including security patches.

Utilize the protection of SSL.

This promotes a secure connection between the server and the client, warding eavesdroppers out.

Defend your site with a trustworthy anti-malware.

This prevents any harm that malicious programs pose against you and your site’s visitors.

When you prioritize website security, you are not only preventing whatever harm may happen to your site and your visitors, but you are also helping to retain the positive image that your site has.

Should you fail to provide the necessary protection, expect a big hit on your site’s reputation. It is better to be safe.

The bottom line

With the holidays fast approaching, it is best to start preparing your site right now. These tips above are some of the most straightforward ways of how you can do just that.

The holidays are a great time for any site, and you should be able to tap the season well so that you can reap all the benefits. So prepare your site now with the five tips above so you can make the most out of the holidays with your site.

Author Bio

Kenneth Sytian is a WordPress developer in the Philippines, the CEO of Sytian Productions. He has been designing websites and developing web apps for more than a decade. He is considered one of the top influencers in web design and development in the Philippines.

**Digital Spark Marketing’s Firestorm Blog**

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

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 continually improving your continuous learning?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

How to Make a Favorable Impression with an Audience

favorable impression with every audience — **Favorable impression with every audience.**

Here is the recommendation. Give it a try.

You are sitting in an unassuming corner of the room and allowing everyone else to talk.

You wait for a pause in the conversation, and then, in a quiet voice — but loud enough to be heard — say, “I have a story to tell you.”

That’s the secret.

Telling a good story. That’s all you have to do to make that favorable first impression. You will capture their attention.

Keeping control is another matter. It will depend on the strength of your story and the skill and generosity with which you tell it.

Tell the story well, but don’t perform it. Tell it with great care, great involvement, great vulnerability, and great sensuality.

The story shouldn’t be like a spotlight shining on you; it should be like a gift you’re giving the listeners.

Giving gifts is how you take over the room, and the best gifts are stories.

The reason that stories are so appealing is that you can transport customers into the story and give your message more meaning.

Here are 12 ways to create a story that will permit you to hold onto that favorable impression that you have captured.

Your story components

Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your story.

Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development.

Resolve your themes, mysteries, and so on in the final third, the resolution.

importance of first impression — **Importance of the first impression.**

Use your experience

To tell great stories, examine your life for times, places, and perspectives nobody else had. Where do you find material for storytelling?

Draw from your experiences and look inside yourself. Rely on what you know and draw from it. Capture a thought, truth from your experience, and express values from deep down in your core.

When you tell about these experiences, make it is as if your audience were there.

Good stories are largely an act of curation. The greats detect stories as they move through life and then pull them together in ways that make us stop and think. In ways, that inspire.

Whenever you tell this story, speak authentically, from the heart. Don’t worry about what people will think.

Whether you swear like a sailor or are as clean-cut as they come, whether you are reserved and quiet or as intense as a Navy SEAL instructor, use your personality and style whenever you share your message.

Employ a strong theme

A strong theme is always running through a well-told story.

The theme is often not stated directly in the story, but it is the essence or the core idea at the story root.

A clear sense of your theme or controlling idea keeps you from trying to throw too many ideas into one story.

Create, challenge, or conflict

Good stories are about challenge or conflict.

Without these elements, stories aren’t very interesting. In its most basic form, a story is about someone who wants something, and either gets it or does not.

That character’s desire brings out the conflict that moves a story forward. The appearance of the conflict is the beginning; the resolution is its ending.

The compelling part of a story is how people deal with conflict–-so start with the people and the conflict.

Make it hard to separate the challenges from the characters.

Work on your ending

Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle.

Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working upfront.

Raise anticipation

Raise questions. Provide “bait.”

The anecdote should raise a question right from the beginning. Implied in any question that you raise, however, is that you are going to answer it.

Constantly raise questions and answer them. The shape of the story is that you are throwing out questions and answering them along the way.

Give characters personality and opinions

Give your characters a unique personality and opinions on various topics. What is your character good at, comfortable with?

Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them.

How do they deal? Personalities add greatly to the stories.

Tap into your audience’s emotions

Whenever I can listen to the best storytellers capturing their audience, I am struck by their power to pull listeners in.

It is much like a gravitational force that’s impossible to resist.

The best way to pull your audience in is to make them care … emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically.

But how do you make the audience care? This is the most fundamental question of all.

There is no single answer.

One important answer is having empathy for your audience and trying to craft your story and design your content always with the audience in mind.

Stories in all their many forms are never just about transferring information alone. We are emotional beings.

To make the audience care enough to listen to you, you have to evoke their emotion.

Build mystery and surprise

A well-told story is one where you can stop at any point and have the reader wonder “….and then what happened?”

Each time a piece of the mystery is solved, another one appears.

That’s what keeps us listening until we reach the ending.

If you find yourself struggling at times, step back and find some mystery.

Show and don’t tell

Show and don’t depend just on telling. Intensify the story with vivid language and intonation.

Tap into people’s emotions with language.

Use metaphors, idioms, and parables that have emotional associations.

“Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.” – Ernest Hemingway

Give them creativity

Be creative. Create a storyboard; draw it out.

A good story always has ups and downs, so “arc” the story.

Pull people along, and introduce tension. Make it just like in a fairy tale.

There should be nothing that is standard fare. Focus on making it always creatively unique.

Leave them curious

Great stories pull readers past the obvious (but wrong) to show them the profound.

You don’t have to beat people over the head with your message, nor do you need always to make your message painfully obvious.

This is not about being vague or unclear.

It is about letting the audience work on their own a little to figure things out. Always create some curiosity.

That’s one of your jobs as one who creates a story. We’re born problem solvers. We’re compelled to deduce and to deduct.

That’s what we do in real life. It’s this well-organized absence of information that draws us in.

The bottom line

Leonardo Da Vinci’s life as a creative thinker provides inspiration and lessons to learn for individuals and companies working in the creative sector.

The lessons above have a direct relationship with the design and innovation process inside companies.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

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 improve your marketing, branding, and advertising?

Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he writes about topics that relate to improving the performance of the business.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

How to Completely Change to WOW Customer Service

You can only stand out from the crowd if you are a member of the crowd. How often, as a customer, do you try and change to WOW customer service … the type that you normally can’t imagine? If it is often, would you consider yourself a customer service evangelist?

Consider creative people. Creative businesses conduct WOW customer service because they seek to complete something, to heal something, to change something for the better. To move from where they are now to a more centered, more complete place. You don’t get creative once everything is okay. In fact, we are creative because everything isn’t okay (yet).

Average or less customer service seems like the norm in many industries. In some, it’s so common that when we provide great service, we yield customers who feel like they’ve won the lottery, if only for a moment. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Related: Some Great Story and Storytelling Examples to Study

Creating a customer service evangelist should not be rocket science, should it?

If you were asked to name the top 5-10 items that have the greatest influence on creating a customer service evangelist, what would your list include? Our agency often runs customer experience/service design workshops and this question is a key exercise in the workshop.

Start with this list when deciding where to improve your customer service. And don’t forget to get direct feedback from your customers.

Here are the best key ways to create a customer service evangelist business, in our opinion … in today’s social and online environment:

Make customer-facing employees the ultimate customer service providers

The best use of a live support service channel is to be there for higher levels of service issues and the point of the issue becoming something big.

Self-service should free up your service staff to devote high focus to these types of issues. This will elevate the attention such subjects really deserve.

Wow customer service … keep detailed customer interaction to a minimum

The secret to delivering exceptional service is to actually not get too involved with customer requests. Consumer research indicates that when customers are looking for information and answers, they tend to not want to talk to people. The experience of today is moving to digital.

Wow internet reviews … resolve customer issues quickly

Noticed the pace of people’s daily schedules lately? Not much free time is there? Time is definitely at a premium. As a result, customers are increasingly choosing to self-serve.

Therefore your business needs to define a satisfying self-service. Easy to use is at the top of the priority list. For today’s time-starved customers who expect simple ways to get answers, your self-service has to deliver the right answer in the first attempt.

Anticipate and prepare for questions

The best defensive back in the game of football does his best at anticipating what the quarterback of the opposing team will do next.

He wins if anticipates well. You need to do the same for your customers … being prepared for all questions and anticipating what question will come next.

Great customer service intelligence means giving them a correct and simple answer quickly. Then you need to anticipate the question that is coming next. Doing these things well takes the digital self-service experience to a whole new level.

Don’t underestimate bad customer experience consequences

Customers in the social age wield great power, don’t they? They have high expectations, lots of choices, and are less loyal as they used to be. So, often you only get one chance to make a great impression. Take the opportunity to cater to their service needs.

Customer service evangelist … make customer action options easy to find

Recognize that customers will occasionally want live support. Make that live support easy to find and access. Doing so does a lot to ensure customer confidence in your business.

It shows you place a high value on customer service. Can you think of a better differentiator?

Make mobile experience match web experience

Have you noticed that mobile devices go everywhere with your customers? They want the same quick response (or quicker) customer service responses from mobile devices as everywhere else.

And that demand is definitely growing. Digital self-service in the mobile channel will soon be the top dog … pay attention.

The bottom line

What’s missing is the concept of service. The desire to help clients achieve their goals rather than to assume you know what their goals should be. Talk about direct response metrics won’t help a client whose brand awareness is trailing by ten points.

Interestingly, top digital players like Yahoo! and Google do understand this. However, many in the industry are still the same arrogant bunch that went down in the first dot-com boom and will surely go down again, screaming “nobody gets it!” along the way.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, the customers will manage 85% of the relationship with a business without interacting with anyone in the business. Are you getting ready?

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?

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 him on 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.

The Go-Getter’s Guide for Building Customer Advocates for New Business

The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers. So, ok … we have taken small liberty on Peter Drucker’s quote. We added the part about who creates customers. We are pretty sure Drucker would agree with us. After all, building customer advocates are one of the most important jobs of the business.

Let’s remind ourselves what an advocate is. An advocate is a person who publicly supports or recommends a particular business, cause, or policy.

For example, MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) and PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) are groups that work to publicize and find solutions for particular issues.

These advocate groups have a big impact on the issues they’re passionate about. Because of their passion, they have big power to influence how the public thinks and acts about responsible driving and animal treatment.

Research by Edelman’s trust barometer indicates that buyers, customers, and consumers often will trust each other far more than they’ll trust employees, sales or company.

While factual information about product specs, pricing, and usage will still be relevant on the corporate website, expect customers to do online research, and consider advice from their peers before they make purchasing decisions.

In his book, The Hidden Wealth of Customers, Bill Lee puts it this way:

“After a customer completes a purchase, what is typically left of the table is a gold mine of ways that firms can increase both the value they provide for customers and the profitability customers generate for the firm.

With the new customer value proposition, you essentially reinvent your relationship, transforming customers into what I call customer advocates, influencers, and contributors.”

Customer evangelism is something companies, and marketing consultants have talked about for years.

Often though, the big companies get all the attention in this area. People assume small and mid-sized companies can’t create customer evangelists. But they’re very wrong.

Here are nine secrets you should know about creating customer evangelists no matter what size your company is:

Create a business cause

Great products and services don’t usually inspire your market. Great causes do. Apple stands for individualism. Disney believes in making memories. AARP’s higher purpose advocates for making life better for American’s over 50 years old.

What values run through your marketing strategy and customer community? Your organization will attract people who share those beliefs.

When customers buy into your big picture, they will not only fight to strengthen your community, but they will advocate for your business’s cause.

Talk to your customers

Have real person-to-person conversations with as many customers as you can. If you have a lot of customers relative to your employees, then you’ll need to prioritize your most valuable customers.

Find ways to have real, meaningful, and ongoing conversations with them.

This might mean inviting some to lunch. It might mean hosting get-togethers at your business. It might start with a survey and end with a phone call or a meeting. For others, it might be virtual conversations using email or Web 2.0 tools.

Get customers involved

Find multiple ways to get your customers involved. For some people, just a regular phone call or lunch will be enough. For others, you might get their help finding solutions to challenges you’re facing.

Create communities for your customers to participate in. Forums and blogs are great for this. Software and online companies have done this for years but so can small businesses.

One great way to do this is for your business to invite customers to submit pictures of themselves with their products and services.

Then post the pictures on their website. A very popular and successful example of building a community.

Building customer advocates … serve their needs

Of course, you’re doing this to make your company better. But everything you do in your customer evangelism effort needs to be useful from your customer’s perspective.

Educate them while you engage them.

Always do things in ways that are useful to and respectful of your customers. Keep that as your primary focus.

Help customers connect

Helping customer community members associate with like-minded people is a big part of turning customers into advocates.

When a customer is excited about your products, services, and the results that your company has helped them deliver, they are eager to share that experience with their friends.

Those who are receptive to these stories are most likely going to be potential advocates.

Provide online and offline opportunities for customers to connect with other customers. These could be customer events or online activities.

By making it easy for customers in similar positions to connect, you are teeing up your most passionate fans to find strength in numbers.

Amazon Antitrust Issues: Applying a Cost Benefit Analysis

Building customer advocates … be open

However, you engage your customers in making sure you do it genuinely and honestly. Be open about what you’re doing and why.

Make the process as transparent as possible. The more open you are with your customers, the more open they will be with you.

Empower your employee’s participation. Don’t script them or micro-manage their involvement.

Let them get to know your customers and vice- versa. The more your customers know and like your employees, the more likely they will be evangelists for you.

The bottom line in creating loyal customers who promote your business is this:

You need to care about them.

Every action your company takes needs to show your customers you are there to serve their needs. When you do this, you will deliver an experience that your customers can’t get anywhere else.

So they’ll come back. And, they’ll bring others with them.

Deliver what you promise and promptly fix what goes wrong

This is an obvious starting point, which everyone knows, but many firms lose sight of over time. Marketing that’s based on customer advocacy and influence must keep this basic truth front and center.

These frontline actions are what underlie any genuine enthusiasm from a customer.

You can’t create or enlist a customer advocate without the solid foundation of an ongoing, responsive delivery and service relationship.

Help customers achieve their goals

The most important job of your business is to help your customers solve their problems and achieve their goals.

Aligning your customer strategy, content, and community management tactics with your customers’ most critical challenges is a surefire way to make your business indispensable to your customers.

The equation is simple. Satisfied customers are much more likely to advocate for your product, service, or company.

Be consistent in building customer advocates

When a company has an active customer advocacy focus, customers are sharing ideas with each other.

They are asking the company and its partners for advice. And they are responding honestly to communication from you.

This is fertile ground to recruit new members of your customer advocates.

Keeping the pipeline full at the early stages of their support is critical to building momentum in your market.

To put it as simply as possible … create customer evangelists by caring about your customers and showing it with everything you do.

The bottom line

Not everyone appreciates your efforts to be remarkable at building customer advocates.

In fact, most people aren’t. So what? Most people are ostriches, heads in the sand, unable to help you anyway.

Your goal isn’t to please everyone. Your goal is to please those that actually speak up and spread the word.

BUILD INNOVATIVE CHANGE — **Build a successful innovative change.**

It’s up to you to keep improving your customer engagement and relationship building performance and creativity.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to continually improving your customer service?

Do you have a lesson about making your customer relationships better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add to the section below?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

Break All Rules and Be Different For Each Customer

The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all but goes on making his own business better all the time. A great quote from Henry Ford. Yes, your best competitors are making their business better and better all the while. And their growth is all about their marketing strategy. Of course, if you pay attention to competitors, you know this. That is what Google would tell you if they were marketing your company. They would also tell you to pay attention and to be different for each customer.

And pay particular attention to your best and long-term customers.

Michael Schrage writes about a large bank that discovered that 10 percent of their customers were using their online banking service every day, while the remainder were using it about once a month.

If the bank brought in a consultant to evaluate this, his first conclusion would be for the bank to stop spending so much on the service for so few people.

It was, after all, appealing to only the innovators and the early adopters. After a little analysis, however, the consultant would show this small group also accounted for about 70 percent of the bank’s deposits.

The ultimate goal of all the points I list below is this: eliminate the fluff from your marketing strategy and focus only on the things that work.

It is often easy to look at an idea distribution curve and tell that the most profitable place to be is right in the center, where all the customers are.

However, that doesn’t reflect reality most of the time. Often, the valuable sections of customers are located to one side or the other.

What this bank realized is that by focusing on this small slice of innovative customers, the bank may be able to attract even more highly profitable, risk-seeking customers. And leave the much less attractive customers to seek out competitor banks.

Here is another example where simple business processes overwhelm and, often, totally lose customers by creating terrible experiences for them. This is an actual letter sent to a bank by an 86-year old woman. The bank manager thought it amusing enough to have it published in the New York Times. Sound familiar?

Dear Sir:

I am writing to thank you for bouncing my check with which I endeavored to pay my plumber last month.

By my calculations, three nanoseconds must have elapsed between his presenting the check and the arrival in my account of the funds needed to honor it

I refer, of course, to the automatic monthly deposit of my entire pension, an arrangement which, I admit, has been in place for only eight years.

You are to be commended for seizing that brief window of opportunity, and also for debiting my account $30 by way of penalty for the inconvenience caused to your bank.

My thankfulness springs from the manner in which this incident has caused me to rethink my errant financial ways.

What would you do, as bank President, after receiving this letter? Would your actions include looking closely at some of your ‘simple’ business processes?

The bottom line

That’s the thing, customers are never all the same. Neither should be your business practice applications to those customers.

Differentiate your customers. Find and know the group that is most profitable for your business. Find out who your long time customers are. They are the ones most likely to be your advocates. Find the group that is most likely to be moving into this most profitable group.

Figure out how to capture the hearts of these groups and focus less on the rest. Review your best practices and see if you could simplify some to make them better and more convenient for these groups.

Don’t let your best practices and/or your marketing cater to the masses. Cater to those customers that will make the difference to the real success of the business.

Remember this above all else. Don’t just keep up with your competitors. Always strive to leapfrog.

Not just best practices but next practices.

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.

It’s up to you to keep improving your creative, social marketing efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

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.

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 him on 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.

Check out these additional articles on business lessons from our library:

Retail Design …11 Ways Businesses Are Responding to the Future

Business Leaders … 7 Lessons Jack Welch Taught Me about Them

The Business Intelligence Process Part 3 Competitive Analysis

Check out our thoughts on customer focus.

When we work with clients on customer experience or customer service design, we always start with things not to do.

Why may you ask? Simple. For every bad experience we create for customers, we need to create anywhere from 5-10 experiences just to break even. Customers remember the bad easier than the good.

With the advent of the Internet, the number of marketing options available to both budding and experienced entrepreneurs has become staggering.

Related: Simplify Customers Lives for Remarkable Experiences

When it comes to running our companies, we all get into a rut from time to time. One big weakness is not having enough time in the day to assess all of the ways our customers are interacting with us, whether it’s digital or good old face-to-face.

With all the access customers have to products and services other than your own, it’s extremely easy to lose opportunities to make them happy.

Take a look at your business and see if any of these bad experiences may be losing your customers:

Most customer attrition … employees ignoring customers

How many times have you walked into a store and you find employees hard at work doing store tasks? An easy way for them to ignore you, isn’t it? How about when you find them talking to each other about their shifts or, worse yet, about the fact that they hate working today?

Telephone handoffs

Have you ever called your business phone number to see what the customer experience is like? I do it all the time.

If your phone tree has lots of branches and a complex menu, your customers or prospects can’t get someone to talk to in a quick and easy fashion; you could lose them forever. It is one of my biggest pet peeves.

Don’t greet your customers on the phone with the “Please listen to the following as our menu has changed” message. That takes a solid five seconds that a customer could be in touch with you faster.

Also, assess what most of the calls coming in are concerning. If they’re usually on a specific topic, then that should be the “Press one for … ” option. Never hesitate to change your phone tree.

Telephone etiquette

Have you ever had to wait for someone to get off his/her mobile device before helping you? Likewise, had an employee answer the phone while waiting on you? Think of a customer coming into your business and experiencing the same. Nothing can be more frustrating and rude.

I’ve been at a restaurant and waited for 10 minutes before I was asked if I wanted a menu simply because the wait staff was updating Facebook. And it doesn’t only happen at retail locations; it happens in the office environment, too.

It shows a lack of respect for your customers or co-workers and it says to them that whatever’s happening on your phone or laptop is more important than everyone else’s time. And time is one of life’s most important assets.

Your employees need to put customers first, before texting and social media, and if they want to do those things, then it should be during their time.

Customer attrition analysis … feel welcome?

Have you ever walked into an office and had no one pay attention to you? Or ever shopped at a store and no one asked if you needed help? My husband walked into a local store, shopped for an item for about 10 minutes and none of the four employees (who weren’t busy) asked if he needed help.

He then brought his purchase to the counter and gave the check-out person his credit card. The entire transaction happened without a word. Really? No feelings of being welcomed here, is there?

Many retail businesses make it someone’s job to welcome people into the store. Restaurants have hosts that greet you and get you seated. All businesses, not just retail, need to have some way of knowing when a visitor has arrived.

Make sure you and your people are smiling and welcoming newcomers into your place of business; you never know who they might be.

Losing customers … inconsistencies

If you’re a customer, and you like to frequent a particular business, you expect a certain level of performance that you’ve grown accustomed to, whether it be a website that works well or the quality of a meal at a restaurant.

If you think you have the best pizza in New York, it better to be the best pizza every single time you serve it.

The bottom live

You can’t neglect your customer experience if you want them to stay with or recommend your business.

Remember, customers create the most value for you … when you create the most value for them.

Here’s the thing, customer experience isn’t just a new way of marketing, it’s a new way of running a business isn’t it? Many businesses certainly have figured this out and are using social marketing and improved customer experience to grow their business rapidly.

Practices that are proactively managing all elements of their customer experiences are most successful in achieving customer loyalty.

Do you have a lesson about improving your customer focus you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.

It’s up to you to keep improving your customer attention and focus. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas to make your customer experiences better.

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 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.

More reading on customer experience from our Library:

Brands are verbs. What they do matters more than what they say. Verizon customer service standards are part of the brand’s deal.

Verizon customer service. Do you pay more attention to what brands do than what they say they will or should do?

Think carefully about your last few experiences with brands. While you gather your thoughts, let me tell you about a terrible Verizon customer service standards experience that my wife and I recently went through.

Check out our thoughts on customer focus.

Have you ever visited a Verizon store? Hopefully, it was a better visit than ours. Perhaps it will stimulate your thinking about your recent customer experiences.

My wife has had her ‘flip’ phone for almost a decade. Her display has been badly cracked for the better part of a year, so our daughter purchased her a new flip phone for her birthday. She refused to try a smartphone.

Related: 7 Ways to Create a Customer Service Evangelist Business

So before I tell you about our experience at Verizon where we went to get the phone activated, let me ask you a question. How long should it take to activate a simple flip phone, do you think?

You probably won’t believe the answer. Over an hour and there were no customers in the store when we arrived. That should be a clue of how bad the service and experience was, yes?

Here are the problems we experienced and what Verizon should have improved on:

Customer service standards … excessive time to accomplish the task

Ok, I have already told you that it took over an hour to activate a simple flip phone.

But I didn’t tell you that the service representative could not even complete the task. More on that following. That is amazing.

Service representative not knowledgeable

Over an hour with the service representative, four calls to Verizon and two visits to the other service representative in the store, and he did not finish the task.

Need I say more about his knowledge of the Verizon products?

Customer service standards … service or sales?

I have said that we were there in the store to get my wife’s new phone activated. We already selected and had the new Verizon phone when we arrived.

That did not stop the service representative from trying to sell us other products and cell phone packages on four occasions during the service visit.

Made it our problem

We did not bring our USB cord with us, as we did not think we needed it. The store could not find one for this phone.

This became the source of all the activation issues experienced during the visit.

Do you have a screwdriver?

When the visit started, the service representative needed to remove the battery, which apparently required the use of a screwdriver.

He asked my wife if she had one with her. Double amazing, yes?

No store teamwork

When we arrived at the store, there were no customers present and two customer service representatives. The representative that helped us was a stand-in from a store 80 miles away.

Neither representative knew each other nor the second one was not very supportive in helping in finding a solution to the difficulties his store mate was having (even though he was not busy with any customers for the first 15 minutes).

Never completed job

As we have previously said the service representative never completed his task.

He didn’t think he had transferred the contacts from the old phone, and he could not figure out how to back up the phone.

Good thing he gave up on the contact transfer, as when we got home we discovered there were three copies of each old contact in the new phone.

Very anxious to move to next customer

As you can imagine, after about 30 minutes trying to finish our job, there were 3-4 customers waiting for service. That put everyone even more on edge.

The service representative became even more anxious to move on to the next customer. Not a good scene.

The bottom line