Could one of several things, right? In this article, we will tell you how to make customer service this critical factor. But before we begin we want to tell you an important story. Let’s get started.
One of the things about the modern world is instantly recognized brands. For people who travel a lot, these brands make the world a much smaller and more convenient place.
In most of my career, I traveled to Washington DC a lot, as my company’s headquarters was located there. The last year before my retirement, I was in suburban Washington DC. I needed to accomplish two tasks that I could have easily done at home. However, the businesses I needed were not located in my area.
Without two large, well-known brands I might have spent a lot of time running around Rockville, Md. Instead, I stopped at the local branches of two companies I’ve used many times during my visits.
Both visits needed to be completed that evening for my briefing at headquarters the next day.
My two experiences could not have been more different.
The first was a clothing store, the Men’s Wearhouse. This was a quick errand because all I needed were two collar stays.
When I arrived at the store, I noted all the staff was busy in what appeared to be a meeting. Before I could say anything, two people flew out of their chairs simultaneously asking how they could help me.
It was almost scary how fast and naturally they responded. It was not at all what I expected.
One of the salespeople hurried to get some collar stays. The other chatted with me. Not once did any of them act like I had interrupted their meeting.
Instead, they made me feel welcome and comfortable like I was a lifelong customer or a good friend.
I never told them I was a Men’s Wearhouse customer. They had no idea, and they didn’t seem to care. Their entire focus was on helping me any way they could. I entered the store needing two collars stays.
I left with a handful of collar stays and one more great reason to remain a loyal and enthusiastic customer of this company.
My next task at the local FedEx Kinko’s store didn’t go nearly as smoothly.I had a 30-page briefing, and I needed eight copies.
At the counter, there were no other customers were waiting. After a couple of minutes, an employee approached and asked what I needed. I told him, and he replied “no problem: tomorrow morning okay?”
I explained that my job could not wait and I said I was hoping to get it done tonight, while I waited.
“No problem,” he said. “You can print it yourself on our laser printer over there.” He pointed toward some cubicles. “Just put your CD in one of the computers. You can do it yourself in a couple of minutes.”
After a few minutes on the task, I realized the price per page was 49 cents if I printed it myself. For 240 pages, that would be close to $120. That seemed high, even for Washington DC.
So I went back to the same employee and asked him about the pricing. He confirmed the 49 cents rate per page. He also confirmed that it would cost about $10 total if I had them print it.
“That’s a big difference in cost” I suggested to him. No response. Nothing.
“Tell you what,” I said. “That’s a little more than I wanted to pay. How about if you go ahead and print the document? I need it tonight.”
Instead of responding, he walked away to talk to another employee. When he came back, he said: “the best we can do is 8:00.”
Wanting to be 100% clear, I asked “8:00 tonight?” “Yep,” he said.
It was 6:30 so I said that’d be fine. I could kill an hour or so by grabbing dinner and a newspaper.
By 7:40, I was back at the FedEx Kinko’s store. After waiting at the customer service counter for a couple of minutes, someone asked what they could help me with.
I explained my situation, and he went to look for my print job.
“It’s not here” he yelled to no one in particular.
I got his attention, and I pointed to the employee who helped me earlier. They convened a quick meeting and determined that the job was not done. In fact, it had not yet been started. It was 7:50 pm.
I asked if there was anything I could do to help. The one who wrote up my print job 90 minutes ago, grunted in reply. He went to work on it. It took less than five minutes to print.
By 8:00 I left the store with my printed document and with a new opinion of FedEx Kinko’s. And it was not a new and improved opinion either. It was vastly inferior to my previous perception.
Two simple tasks with two major brands. And two vastly different experiences. Experiences that created two lasting memories to influence my future buying decisions.
Don’t stand by while your competitors beat you to the best brand loyalty. Brand loyalty depends on a remarkable brand experience every time.
What are you doing to make their first 30 seconds on your platform extraordinary? If you can’t answer this question, you need to start here. First impressions are everything.
Show customers that you care
Make them feel something. If you want to grab my attention on social media, make me laugh. Make me cry. Make me feel something, anything.
When I have a super busy day, and I am engaging customers, I have no choice. No choice due to the amount of them and time constraints choosing where and when I am going to respond.
It is an easy choice for me. I respond to the people who grab my attention.
The people who are nice, who make me feel good. The people who are genuine. The people who make me laugh. Pull an emotional chord.
Don’t send snarky tweets trying to get attention. Most people can see right thru the snark and won’t respond.
I ignore the trolls and the folks looking only for attention. Be genuine and offer something of emotional value.
Defines brand identity … go the extra mile
Consumers always enjoy good stories and helpful information that educates.
Use social media primarily to educate fans about your products and services. Watch the engagement you receive to see what their followers want.
When you publish something that’s educational, you should expect an average of three to seven responses.
The bottom line
No one has all the answers. A company where only management makes decisions is a surefire way to send A and B players away to other companies.
As some companies get bigger, they tend to limit employee freedom. The employees are less and less involved in key decisions and their impact on the business is drowned out. It becomes a part of the culture. Employees go to work, do what they’re told, and just help someone else achieve their dream. The worker’s impact on the business is minimal and they become “just another employee at just another company.” And for some people, it’s all they want: go into work, take orders, do the job, and wait for the clock to hit 5:00 P.M.
But this is not what the best employees want.
Listen more than you talk. You’ll be amazed at how much you can learn about your audience when you shut up. Shut up, listen, and then flawlessly execute. Try it, and you will be amazed by the results.
Do you have a lesson about making your customer experience better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add to the section below?
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
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 innovating your social media strategy?
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 brands and branding 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.
How many of you consider customer service or your best customer experience stories as elements of your marketing? Consider this … if done well; don’t you think both could create things for
customers to talk about? And therefore be enablers for your word of mouth marketing strategy. Let me share a story with you as an example.
Here is a short story of a customer experience story.
The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them— preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.
—Richard Branson
Recently I took my sister to our local credit union branch office to take care of three different transactions: getting a credit card reactivated, depositing coins, and ordering checks. The coins required a visit, but the other two transactions could have been done by phone or maybe online. I hoped one visit to a local branch would be easier, but deep down I feared it wouldn’t.
Frankly, I expected we’d be shuttled around the branch to different people to take care of each transaction. Or, worse, told to use the phone to call the credit card support number directly.
Instead, it turned into a quick and extraordinary experience. Because when we entered the branch, a banker warmly greeted us and asked how he could help. After learning what my sister needed to do, he invited us to sit down at his desk.
He then took care of everything: Called the credit card division of Wells Fargo to activate a credit card, took the coins to the teller to make the deposit and returned with a receipt, and ordered new checks. I call attention to the fact that the banker didn’t know us or how much money we had with the credit union
My perspective:
So you see how these events represent a great way to market to customers, don’t you? Think I would talk about my experience with my friends and neighbors? Most.
Let me share three more personal experiences, two very good and one not so good:
My wife and I stopped by our local P.F. Chang’s Restaurant for lunch last month. It was a beautiful Florida spring day, and since it was mid-week the restaurant wasn’t too busy, so we decided to sit on the patio.
However, when we asked the hostess to be seated outside we were told that it would be 15-20 minutes before we could be seated. However, we could be seated immediately if we wanted to sit inside.
When I asked why we couldn’t be seated immediately … since about half the tables were open, we were told that there wasn’t enough staff scheduled on the patio to serve more tables.
Clearly, this service staff did not have the decision-making authority for creating good customer experiences!
My perspective:
If there were enough staff in the restaurant to serve the total number of customers, then why couldn’t they simply reallocate some of the inside staff to serve outside on the patio?
If the hostess was delegated the decision-making authority to take initiative to make every customer experience a good to great one, then perhaps this might have resulted differently?
Examples of good customer service stories … MARRIOTT
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 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.
So these results show the importance of turning customer failure into full customer recovery.
My perspective:
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. You will be amazed at the results.
culture. I experienced it first hand and was duly impressed.
The story started a while back while I was sitting on the runway in Orlando as my homeward-bound Jet Blue flight was about to taxi toward takeoff.
Like just about every other flight that hadn’t already been canceled that day on the Eastern seaboard, ours was a couple of hours late departing.
The lead flight attendant gets on the P.A. system and says something very close to:
Ladies and Gentlemen, we know we’re late taking off, and even though it’s the weather and not something we caused, we’re going to comp everybody movies for this flight.
We know you’ve all had a long day and we want it to end with something nice and relaxing. And for those of you who were supposed to be on the Continental flight and ended up here, we don’t ever want you to go back.
The mood on the flight which could have been a rather dreary late evening affair took an immediate upswing.
People joked and smiled and made eye contact. They were noticeably brighter and calmer as the flight progressed. And I’m writing about the experience today and business travelers are reading about it.
What enabled this relatively small act of kindness and allowed it to become a major brand statement? Midflight, I went to the back of the plane and asked.
I wanted to know the policy that allowed a flight attendant to make such a call.
We’re allowed to make almost any decision, the flight attendant explained, as long as we can justify it by one of the airline’s five core values: Safety, Caring, Integrity, Fun or Passion.
If we can tie doing something back to one of these principles, the decision is going to be supported by the company.
My perspective:
What JetBlue is saying to its employees … if you act in support of the values that matter to our business, we want you to take risks to care for our customers.
This is a very simple concept, eh? But how many of us put such a thing into practice with our people? Sit down today with your employees and do what Jet Blue did.
Start building your employee empowerment culture today.
Create a culture of empowerment based on the values that YOUR business is built on.
Need some help in building better customer trust from your customer experiences? Creative ideas to help grow your customer relationships?
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.
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 experience 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 onFacebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
