Sharp Customer Service: Steps to Make Service the Heart of Our Business
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. Maya certainly has a firm grasp of the subject of sharp customer service, doesn’t she?
Feelings and emotions are the heart of sharp customer service, aren’t they? And social customer care is really the key to your marketing campaigns … particularly word of mouth marketing. So you are getting the picture, right?
Customer care 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.
With everyone so focused on the very big and positive impact that customer care can have on the customer experience, many companies fail to realize that social customer care can have just as big and positive an impact on the employee experience.
And that alone multiplies the importance of customer care to customer experience design.
Related: Why the Landscape Is Changing for Social Customer Care
The fact that approaches to social customer care can vary adds to this challenge. Some companies are using social channels to resolve customer concerns and questions publicly, while others prefer to take social feedback offline and route the customer to phones or online chats. Some are investing in social-listening tools and vendors, while others are creating in-house social-care teams.
In the end, the biggest challenge is finding the right balance. That is would we will address today … steps to achieving the best in social customer care.
Here are 11 steps we recommend our clients take to make goals of customer care the very best and balanced they can be:
Sharp customer service … customer care is not just about solving problems
Customer care should not necessarily be any different from “serving customers”. Solving problems is always important, but helping our customers improve their utility, experience or lives is just as compelling—if not more.
Be more specific; suggest ideas; offer information of value; or recommend solutions from which both you and your customers will benefit. Use any form of suggestions to upsell your customer on the value you can provide … not revenue. The two are not mutually exclusive. A simple: “did you know” portfolio of useful tips, tools, tricks, and tutorials is a powerful and painless accompaniment to your usual response.
Ironically, the people to whom angry customers are exposed most often are usually those whom we pay the least (both in terms of compensation and attention).
Under these conditions, it takes major cultural mojo to inspire and/or motivate them to deliver brand magic at every twist or turn. The trick is to empower your employees to deliver world-class customer service, no matter where they stack up in the “who’s who in your zoo” pecking order.
Customer care never ends
As evidenced by Subway in addressing an online issue about the length of their subs, their response time cost the brand much negative publicity. The fact that this conversation erupted over a weekend certainly isolated the fact that the brand was not “plugged in” to its community or audience.
Truthfully (and in fairness), the same outcome might have happened during the week, but the real lesson here is that a listening strategy tied to customer feedback needs to be always on.
The important point here is to make sure customers can get a hold of you when they need to, and that you can contact them when you need to—and you do indeed need to when they’re having a problem, venting frustration, or simply calling out for help.
Delegate and empower
The paradox of customer service is that the lower down the totem pole you go, the more impactful and important customer service becomes. Every single employee in an organization represents the company.
They are a window into or out of the business; and as far as your customer is concerned, they are the only window. Best to keep it clean, functional, and make sure that what lies beyond the window is suitable viewing—don’t you think?
Perhaps this is why Zappos describes themselves as a service company that happens to sell shoes, or that Southwest Airlines describes themselves as a service company that happens to fly planes.
All customers are not equal
Every single customer—irrespective of their stature, seniority, and their status in life and with the company—deserves to be treated well, respected, and given appropriate attention and effort.
In other words, the minimum level of your bar needs to be higher than the minimum level of your competitors’ respective bars, and therefore higher than your industry averages.
Know who your best customers are and put your best attention on them.
Customer care means near real-time
The ability to solve problems in real time is the consummate difference maker. The more time that elapses between problem and solution, the greater the risk of that problem mushrooming out of control.
The good news is that this is exactly where everything is going… largely thanks to technology. For example, if you have OnStar in your car, you practically have a call-center at your beck and call—a proactive and actionable one with little to no action required on your part.
Customers will pay for awesome service
Building on several of our earlier recommendations is one fairly counterintuitive one: service can actually become a source of revenue for companies—not just directly (i.e., new business from old customers); but also indirectly (i.e. new business from new customers.)
Apple’s Genius Bars give us a glimpse of how premium customers will pay a premium for premium service.
Also, Netflix and Amazon show how premium service is not always incremental, but instead manifests itself in terms of recurring revenue, repeat business, loyalty and higher barriers to entry.
Be proactive.
Anticipate and be proactive
Old customer service translated to speak when it was spoken to. New customer care anticipates requirements, listens attentively for customers in need, and proactively searches for problems to fix.
An active and engaged listening strategy will help to identify opportunities, spot problems before they balloon, and in doing so, surprise and hopefully delight consumers by making an unexpected move in the form of responding to them.
Give away your expertise the heart of customer service
Responding to consumers via blogs, podcasts, social networks and twitter-like platforms is admirable, but a learned art. You’ll need to be adept at knowing when to open up a conversation, pull it in, and close it down.
Your expertise is one of your most valued assets. Use it to your advantage by freely giving it away.
Care is your most important commitment
Care is a commitment, not a one-off happenstance. And there’s no more important commitment than that which we make to our lifeblood—our customers. A commitment, like a relationship, is for keeps.
We need to visibly demonstrate our commitment to our customers in practice and in action. They need to explicitly feel its effect and benefits.
We simply have to get smarter each time we deal with the same person—specifically in terms of how we treat them. It helps us become smarter as a company so we can learn, evolve and improve on the whole.
Focus on continuous improvement
Our final recommendation is an obvious one. Feedback loops need to be active, direct and effective at improving, evolving and moving the business forward.
This highlights an organization with an entirely new set of criteria, beliefs, and characteristics that reflect a company truly in touch with its customer base.
If customer care is deemed a chance for the company to connect and evolve with its lifeblood it will become a cultural obsession.
The Point
The ability—or inability—for a company to serve its customers in a way that is consistent with meeting or beating their expectations will prove to be the ultimate differentiator. It will separate the corporate winners from the losers in the near future.
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 the 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.
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.
More reading on customer service from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Stunning Customer Service Lessons and Their Examples
