Be Different or be dead

December 5, 2016

6 powerful ways startups can launch with great customer service

Source: Unsplash

6 powerful ways startups can launch with great customer service.

Most startups have other priorities when they launch.

Creating interest in their idea, searching for investors and filing any required patents occupy most of the founders’ time at the get-go.

Thinking about creating a customer service culture doesn’t command much attention, if any at all.

It should.

Wrapped around your relevant and compelling idea, building a sustaining enterprise from the beginning must include developing a culture that exists to serve your customers as one of your priorities.

Here’s an approach to begin your service journey without overloading your resources and placing your other critical priorities in jeopardy.

▪️Well before you are overwhelmed with drumming up interest for your launch, take a day and develop a service strategy  for your business.

This strategy is intended to not only emphasize the handful of service elements you intend to focus on (to give you a competitive advantage) but also to define the context for the culture you want.

Avoid aspirational declarations in your strategy. “We will exceed customer expectations” or “We intend to provide excellent customer service” are not particularly helpful in understanding precisely how you intend to service your customers differently than your competitors.

▪️Use the service strategy as your recruitment template; to define the type of skills, experience and attitude in every person you intend hire; not just service employees.

Everyone in the enterprise from CEO to service clerk - must innately possess the service mentality. If you don’t hire with a serving criteria, a strong service culture will escape you.

▪️Establish your own internal language based on the elements of your service strategy. Have everyone ‘talk the same talk’ about service.

For example I insisted we use ‘promises kept’ as the phrase we used to describe meeting a commitment made to a customer. A promise is personal and was intended to engender personal accountability to the customer.

▪️Take a moment to recognize service heroes regardless of whether you have 2 or 3 employees at the startup stage or more. The important thing is to build this recognition “system” early on so it becomes part of ‘the way you do things around here’ - culture.

Bring customers in to have a conversation with the team. It’s extremely important to do this early and to communicate ‘we walk with customers’.

▪️When it is necessary to establish rules and policies to govern how you intend to transact with customers, test your intentions with customers. You need to be easy to do business with and separate your startup from the herd.

Customers will not only give you honest feedback they will be impressed that you asked for their input (because no other organization does).

▪️Even before you have a single customer, decide on what needs to be measured (using you service strategy) and set up a simple system to measure how customers perceive the service they receive from you.

Be the ONLY startup with the foresight to begin crafting a service culture before you open your doors for business.

Waiting is a mistake.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 12.5.16 at 05:50 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

October 31, 2016

6 promising ways to genuinely appreciate your customers

Source: Unsplash

6 promising ways to genuinely appreciate your customers.

Customer Appreciation Days don’t cut it; they actually contribute very little nothing to expressing a ‘thank you’ to loyal customers for their business.

You can’t make people feel appreciated by doing an occasional tribute to their importance. And you can’t do it by holding an event; a often crowded cheesy affair with free coffee and muffins. Or by offering them good prices one day a year.

Customer appreciation should be a continuous event; making making them feel special every time they touch your organization.

These are some of the proven and practical things you can do to warm your customers’ hearts to you 365 days a year.

Assign caring employees to appreciate — Put caring people in customer contact positions.

If you’ve successfully followed my suggestion to recruit people who have a proven track record of successfully serving others, you should have a stable of terrific employees to draw on and assign to customer-facing jobs.

A customer contact employee who doesn’t like human interaction, and all the complications that arise from it, can’t appreciate them. If you don’t have employees who are born to serve, an appreciative environment can’t be created and customers will continue to receive hit-and-miss feedback.

Respect differences — Appreciate each of your customers differently because each one of them has unique appreciation wants. Applying a boilerplate approach to all assumes that everyone likes to be thanked in the same way. Not true.

Everyone is different and the challenge is to find the way they, specifically, like to be recognized for their loyalty. Many organizations use common ‘trash and trinkets’ promotional items and other gimmicks to say thank you and hand them out to everyone.

Notwithstanding the fact that some marketing ‘experts’ claim they’re effective, my experience is that they are cheap and impersonal and should be avoided in favour of a more personalized approach.

De-escalate — Organizations have systems of rules and policies to control operations and to minimize risk (at least that’s what they claim they’re for). And most are quite inflexible when it comes to permitting a frontline employee bend the rule to accommodate a specific customer need. The employee is required to escalate the matter to a supervisor who makes the call on whether or not the rule should be bent or otherwise handled.

Appreciative companies allow frontline employees to have some degree of decision making authority when it comes to such matters; referring the customer to a supervisor is not required and the employee can take care of the customer in real time.

Shock them — People have come to expect a certain level of service business generally. They know that they more often than not need a receipt to return a product and they know that some companies provide in-store credits rather than cash refunds.

This level of expectation is a great opportunity to surprise someone with an act they don’t expect. This isn’t about sending a birthday wish to someone automatically every year, it’s about doing something spontaneously in the moment that shocks them because they are expecting something quite different.

Surprising someone and delighting them with the result speaks volumes about how you really feel about and appreciate them.

Guidelines not orders — Appreciativeness is governed by how well an organization tailors itself to each of their customers; this can be a challenge when it comes to administering its internal policies and procedures which as I’ve stated numerous times are typically written from a control point of view.

The problem is, of course, that if a customer feels suffocated by a policy because it doesn’t work for them, they will not only feel unappreciated, they will be upset and might leave you for a more friendly environment.

To be more appreciative, try and lighten up on your policies and procedures; see if you can use them more as guidelines as opposed to uncompromising rules.
If you do this and allow your frontline folks the power to bend one of your policies occasionally in favour of a reasonable customer request, you’ll not only find an appreciative customer you’ll also get a more engaged employee.

Dumb rules reduce your currency with people and forces them away.

Offer deals to loyalists first — Take a page from The Grateful Dead’s playbook; offer any special promotions and deals you come up with to your loyal fans first, before the general public.

Most organizations use promotions — ‘join me and get 3 month’s free service’ — to acquire new customers by luring them away from their competition.
The problem this strategy creates is that a customer who may have been loyal for 10 years doesn’t qualify for the special deal feels unappreciated — aka is really really pissed — when they find out they can’t get it.

By all means, use promotions to attract new business, but don’t miss the opportunity to use the strategy to show your appreciation to your existing customers first.

Put your customers first if you are serious about showing them your appreciation.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 10.31.16 at 02:22 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

May 30, 2016

7 simple ways to save your customers after a screwup

Source: Unsplash

7 simple ways to save your customers after a screw up.

People would rather have a root canal than have to deal with a customer who has been screwed over.

It’s always amazed me that organizations don’t have a strategy in place to recover from a customer screw-up.

It’s not like screw-ups won’t happen; unfortunately they happen with regularity and for a variety of reasons.

And they are certainly not viewed as a source of opportunity; the intent is to get it over with as soon as possible. Endure the pain and move on without looking back.

We spend literally all of our time trying to prevent screw-ups. New fulfillment systems are implemented, employee training programs are created; anything to deliver service flawlessly and prevent bad stuff happening.

Nothing wrong with this except it denies the reality of screw-ups happening; virtually no time is dedicated to building a recovery capability.

Ironically we EXPECT things to go as promised when we transact with an organization and give them a “C” on their service report card when they do.

Successful recovery has two significant benefits.

▪️Customer loyalty actually increases compared to the OOPS! never having occurred at all!

Customers are impressed with what you did to make things better and tend not to be bent out of shape about the mistake made in the first place. They go WOW! give you an “A”, tell others about their experience; their loyalty deepens.

▪️Effective recovery creates a competitive advantage for the organization because others don’t see the need and continue to pour all of their resources into service breakdown prevention (and continue to get “C’s”).

Focus on these things to turn a screw-up into a competitive opportunity:

1. It is critical to build a service recovery strategy to give recovery activity a strategic context in the organization;

2. Hire people who love chaos and who welcome diving into a mess and sorting it out. They need a high pain tolerance and they need to be amazing problem solvers;

3. Give power and authority to the owner of the screw up (who has the ranting customer in their face) to do whatever it takes to resolve it. Ignore job descriptions;

4. Fix it fast. You have literally 24 hours to recover and reap the rewards of enhanced customer loyalty. After that, you’ve blown it and all you get is misery and a brand rap as they everyone about your crummy service;

5. Surprise them with what they don’t expect. Know the customer you’ve screwed over and personalize the experience for them rather than use a boilerplate solution applied to everyone. If you knew I loved Pinot Noir you could use this knowledge in how you recovered with ME.

6. Take responsibility for the OOPS! whether or not you were directly at fault. Lose your ego. Don’t quote policy. Don’t make it out that it was the customer’s fault (happens all the time). Customers want you to show some empathy then launch into solution mode.

7. Recognize recovery addicts; those individuals who exhibit greatness in mending broken promises and who are natural loyalty builders.

Measure how effective you are at making up with a customer after a fight.

Get their feedback immediately after the scuffle.

Improve as you move on.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 5.30.16 at 05:28 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

December 21, 2015

Why it’s important to tell the truth about the service you receive

Source: Pexels

Why it’s important to tell the truth about the service you receive.

Most businesses these days want their customers to score them on the service they have provided.

In fact some even go to the extent of advising you that you will be receiving a survey to complete and then asking that you give them the best score!

This has happened to me several times from various organizations.

Being a contrarian, I don’t conform and they sometimes regret asking.

Others think that good ratings are based on intent.

Some customer service people expect a good mark simply because their intent was to provide excellent service even though it wasn’t delivered. My web site problem wasn’t solved but the consultant was pleasant and did her best; ergo she expects an excellent rating.
My car repair wasn’t done properly but the service person served me in exemplary fashion and expects a good mark.

Again, I disappoint them by rating the service provided to me by the organization as unsatisfactory.

The ONLY way for any individual to get a good mark is to deliver what was promised in a way that delights.

Fix the car and provide an amazing experience for the customer while doing it and then you get an excellent rating.

Of course the service person says they can’t control what the mechanics do; the web consultant says they aren’t responsible for deciding on what changes are made to the blog posting algorithm.

They are right of course but it’s not my problem!

They need to ensure that the front end intent is delivered by the back end result.

OR, change the front end intent to match the capabilities of the back end; promise what you can deliver.

As a customer, it is our responsibility to teach business about service.

Don’t let them off the hook by giving a high rating to a service rep when the organization didn’t deliver what you asked for.

Teach them a lesson.

Rate them poorly; tell them why and hope they can improve.

If they don’t, go elsewhere.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 12.21.15 at 04:59 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink