Handling Unhappy Customers

For many, their worst nightmare is the thought of being faced with an unhappy or complaining customer. When that happens we feel threatened and that causes us to either fight or flee. Most of us have learned that neither of these work very well but if we knew how to turn an angry customer into a raving fan, we wouldn't be so scared. In fact, we might even look forward to the challenge!

Of course, we want unhappy customers to complain so we can put things right for them. We also want to find and fix the problem that caused the stuff up. But most importantly, we want them to tell US about their bad experience and not everyone else they meet.

The good news is it is not hard to turn unhappy customers into raving fans. You just need to treat them with a LAUGH. Of course, I'm not suggesting you laugh at them. The letters in LAUGH tell us the steps we need to follow.

L stands for: Listen and empathise

You know from your own experience that when something goes wrong you have a story to tell - and customers want to tell their story and vent their feelings. It is important we let them do that. Zip your lips, open your ears and listen to what they have to say. The key thing about listening is to accept what your customer is telling you. You might not like it. You might not understand it. You might not agree with them or you might not know why things went wrong but you must accept that what they are telling you is how they see the world. If you do not, they will stop talking to you. While they are talking, show them you understand how they feel by nodding your head, saying things like: Oh no, Gosh, that's awful, how frustrating. It is easy to do this if you put yourself in your customer's shoes.

A stands for Acknowledge the wrong and apologise

This is the most critical step and the place where most people blow it. When we hear the customer’s story we will be tempted to defend ourselves and justify why it all went wrong. But customers don’t want to hear that. They want to hear some acknowledgement they have been wronged. For example, if your partner agreed to meet you after work and showed up an hour late, you wouldn't want the first thing they say to be about what they bought on the way to meeting you. You would want to hear: "I'm very sorry I'm late. You must be fed up with waiting. I should have called.” Customers are no different. They want to hear the word, 'sorry," then an acknowledgement they have been let down or inconvenienced, and finally that you will put things right for them as soon as possible.

U stands for Understand and take ownership

One of the most powerful ways to calm an irate customer is to show you understand their problem. Ask who, what, why, where, when and how questions to show you are taking the matter seriously. But first explain why you are asking these questions by saying: "So I can understand what’s gone wrong, can I please ask you some questions." After the customer has given you the information you need repeat back they key points you have learned. This shows the customer you really do care and understand their situation.  Now what the customer wants to hear is that you will take personal responsibility for helping them get the problem sorted. They don't want to hear you are passing them on to someone else. They want to hear something like: “I’ll start sorting this out right away!”

G is for Give a solution and do something extra

At the end of the day, unhappy customers want their problem solved. They do not want excuses, explanations or justifications. They want results! Your task is to help them get a solution. It's that simple.

But just putting it right for the customer is not enough. We need to give the customer something extra to make up for the inconvenience and stress they have experienced, and the extra time and effort they had had to spend because we stuffed up. So, what should you give them? Ask them! If you ask your customer, "What would you like us to do to make up for the trouble we have caused you?" You will find they ask for less than you would have expected. That's because when things went wrong, your customer lost control and by asking them that question you are giving control back to them.

H is for Hit home with a follow up and learn from the mistake

There are two reasons why you want to follow up with your customer. First, it shows you care. Secondly, you can make sure everything has been put right to the customer’s satisfaction. You do not want the customer to still be unhappy after you have done all the hard work to put things right and you certainly do not want the customer to experience a second product or service failure and then have to call you again to tell you about it. It takes only a couple of minutes to make a phone call or send an email and it is well worth the trouble.

After you have followed up with the customer, follow up and find the root cause of the problem so you can learn from the mistake. That way you can prevent it from happening to other customers.

Don't be scared of unhappy customers. Treat them with a LAUGH and you will both be delighted with the outcome.

Listen to the Voice of the Customer

The most important lesson I have learned from being in business for 35 years is that your customers will tell you everything you need to know to succeed.

Every day our customers are giving us feedback that can help us improve. We just don't hear it. We don't capture it. We don’t learn from it and therefore we can’t use it to lift our game. Now, this is unfortunate because every year customer expectations are rising and therefore we must all be on a constant journey to find ways to do things better. 

Customers give us feedback by paying us compliments, making complaints, offering suggestions and asking questions.

Compliments are very useful feedback because they not only tell us what we are doing well, they tell us what matters to our customers. After all, we don't compliment people about things that are not important to us. So, compliments tell us what we should keep doing.

If we are lucky, customers will make complaints. I know that sounds strange but complaints really are gifts. First of all they give us a chance to put things right and turn an unhappy customer into a raving fan. But more importantly, complaints tell us where we have problems: systems that don't work, processes not being followed, policies that are not customer friendly.

We should encourage complaints because they tell us where we can improve. Now, I can hear you groan when I say that because nobody likes to deal with an unhappy customer. Perhaps they remind us of an angry parent or perhaps we take their disapproval personally. Or it just might be their aggressive behavior causes us to feel threatened. But if we learned how to handle complaining customers we might feel more comfortable being around them. As a result, we might make it easier for them to tell us what has gone wrong. This would allow us to learn from the mistake and to fix the root cause of the problem. Remember, we do want unhappy customers to tell us about their bad experience otherwise they will go out and tell everybody else.

Suggestions are even better than complaints because customers are not just telling us where we can improve, they have an idea about how we can do something better. But to take advantage of suggestions, we need to put our egos aside and accept the fact that someone who does not work in our company or department could actually have an idea worth listening to.

Even the questions customers ask are worth studying because questions tell us customers have a need that is not being met. Perhaps we hadn't even thought about customers having that need or perhaps we think we are meeting it but in either case questions tell us where we can do something better.

To take advantage of customer feedback, you need a system to capture what your customers are telling you. It could be a very simple system such as a notebook where you write down every compliment, complaint, suggestion or question you receive so that later on you can review the feedback and look for trends and recurring issues. Or it could be a more sophisticated web based system such as Tell Simon, which you can see if you go to tellsimon.co.nz or tellsimon.com.au.

But having a system to capture feedback is not enough. To benefit from what  customers are telling us, we need to have the right attitude. Let me give you an example. Because I am chairman of a small company, two hard fast talking Aussies from Melbourne came to sell me something. I had 2 two-hour meetings with them and presented their offer to my board. We decided not to buy and I sent them an email saying thanks but no thanks.

Since they were hard fast talking Aussies from Melbourne I expected they would put up a fight and sure enough, within 20 minutes I received an email back. This is what it said: “Thank you for telling us your decision. Obviously we are disappointed but we understand your situation. Was there anything about our offer that put you off? Was there anything we said or did that we could have said or done differently?”

And the last time you asked your customers these questions was?  Exactly!

But the email went on to say, “I was raised in a Greek family and taught to respect my elders and to learn from them so I assure you that any feedback you give us will be taken seriously.”

Now, I couldn’t figure out who the elder was but otherwise I thought it was a great email. So I replied saying that, in my opinion, they were very good at talking but not so great at listening. This meant we spent time on things I was not so interested in and not as much time as I would have liked on other things. I said this was not the reason we decided not to buy, but since he had asked for feedback I was telling him this.

I thought he might find this feedback difficult to handle so I expected he would launch a counter attack. Sure enough, in less than a minute, he sent back an email. It said, “Thank you for your honest appraisal, our words will ring in our ears like church bells on a Sunday morning!”

When you get compliments, complaints, suggestions and questions from your paying or internal customers do their words ring in your ears like church bells on a Sunday morning?

They should because your customers will tell you everything you know to succeed!

Sometimes You Have To Be Tough

A retailer recently sought my help because he had an employee who regularly irritated two or three customers a day. "Otherwise she is very good at her job," he told me, "but there is something about her attitude and manner that really gets up customers' noses. I'm getting tired of dealing with the almost daily complaints about her behaviour."

We reviewed the process that leads to getting staff to do the right things:

-       Does she understand the importance of providing a great customer experience?

-       Does she know how she needs to behave to create that experience?

-       Has she been told customers are complaining about her?

-       Does she understand what she is doing that causes these complaints?

-       Does she know this is a serious problem because it discourages customers from coming back and encourages them to tell others about their bad experience?

-       Does she acknowledge she needs to change her behaviour?

-       Has she agreed to change?

-       Have you provided her with coaching to help her change?

The answer to all of these questions was a resounding, yes. I asked if there was any evidence she had tried to change and the answer to that question was, no. "In that case," I told him, " You will have to start the process of dismissing her. She is too big a risk to your business to keep her around."

The retailer was shocked.  From the look on his face you would have thought I had suggested he sold his children into slavery. "We don't fire people," he said indignantly. "We are not that kind of company."  I asked if they were the kind of company who looked after their customers. "Of course we are," he replied.  I told him that in this case he couldn't be both. By choosing not to take a hard line with his employee, he was choosing to expose his customers to the very high risk they would have a bad customer experience.

I have long believed the recipe for the effective management of people is to be 50% supportive and 50% demanding. Clearly, if we are too demanding and insufficiently supportive we will create a culture of fear. That will lower morale and kill any desire to look after the customer, especially if that means doing something extra, spending money or bending a rule. On the other hand, if we are too supportive and not demanding enough, people do not give their best. They cruise and take the easy way out and it is often the customer who suffers. 

I think in New Zealand and Australia we often fall into the trap of being too supportive and not demanding enough. I see a lot of mystery shopping results and I see stores that constantly fall well below the company’s standard in spite of management’s repeated efforts to help them improve. My question to the senior managers of these companies is, ‘Why do you allow this situation to continue?’

Like my friend the retailer, we seem to be reluctant to get tough with staff and consequently fail to protect our customers from bad experiences. Sure, lots of us give an errant employee a dressing down when they do something wrong but we don’t take the action we need to take by removing the person from our customer’s world and fixing the problem once and for all. This failure to follow up the warning with concrete action just teaches the staff member they can ignore your warnings and continue to behave as they always have done.

By saying all this I have probably ignited the debate about whether you should put your staff or your customers first, and many of you will believe you should look after your staff first. But I see no conflict between the two. A customer is anyone using a product or service we produce. Since the products and services of managers are things like policies, resources, instructions and advice, the customers of managers are their staff. As we have discussed many times, one of the keys to business success is to aim to make your customers successful. So, as managers we should aim to make our staff successful. But successful at what? Successful at creating a great experience for their customers. That is why we need to be both supportive and demanding. But just as there are a few paying customers you might choose not to do business with because they are poor payers, dishonest or abusive, there are staff you should choose not to keep because they do not respond to your efforts to help them succeed in looking after your customers.

Here is another reason to deal firmly with staff who continue to create bad experiences for your customers. If you do not engage your staff, they will not look after your customers. Staff who are now engaged will quickly become disengaged if they see you allow one of their colleagues to behave in a way that is contrary to how you have been telling people they should behave. You will quickly lose credibility and respect.

This may sound harsh but you have a responsibility to your customers to remove all obstacles to them having a great experience when they do business with you. After all, they produce 100% of your profits. Obviously there is a process that needs to be followed to help staff improve their performance and, if necessary, to dismiss them. Dismissal should clearly be the last resort. But occasionally, it is an action that needs to be taken. You owe it to both your customers and the rest of your staff to be tough when the need arises.

More About Creating a Positive Personalised Experience

In a recent post,  I suggested you forget about focusing on customer service and aim instead to give your customers a positive personalised experience. Positive because customers wants to enjoy themselves. Personalised because business is a social activity between human beings. Experience because that is what your customers have when they deal with you. There are three parts to this positive personalised experience: the beginning, middle and end. To encourage your customers to return, both the beginning and the end must be strong and the middle must have substance.

The objective at the beginning is to attract the customer into the business and then keep them there. There are seven steps to creating a strong beginning starting with approaching the customer and acknowledging their presence, to greeting them, introducing yourself, welcoming them into your business and engaging them in conversation.

The middle part of the positive personalised experience is where you get down to business. The customer has come to you because they have a problem they want solved. Thus, the objective in the middle is to help the customer solve that problem. Anything short of that will make their time with you seem a waste of time. Last August, a Canadian friend of mine bought a new stove from Home Depot, a leading chain of hardware stores like Bunnings. Recently, a large burner stopped working and since the stove was under warranty, he arranged a service call. After a few phone calls, an appointment was booked. On the day, two men arrived in a van, took a look at the stove and confirmed there was a problem. They said they would report the fault and that someone would be out to fix it in a couple of weeks. If you had been the customer, would you have thought that was a good use of your time?

Delivering a middle with substance means being more than an order-taker. If the customer comes in and asks for a product or service and we give it to them, we are just taking an order. The problem with that is the customers is always right but often wrong. They are always right about the problem they have. They are often wrong about what is the best solution. After all, your customers do not know your business as well as you do. Customer are also often wrong about the problems they could have.  Again, they do not have your depth of experience.

There are six steps to creating a middle with substance.

Step 1

Aim to make the customer successful not just make a sale or complete a transaction. I once went into a furniture store and asked for a particular brand and model of bed. “What’s the concept?” the woman asked. “What are you trying to do?” Sensing I was about to experience something different, I tested her by saying she did not need to know that. She just needed to show me the bed I asked to see. “No,’ she replied. “I do need to know that because if I know what you are trying to achieve I might have a better solution.” And she did!

Step 2

Ask questions before you start showing the customer your products and services. I mystery shopped a costume jewellery store, ostensibly for a gift for my niece. I was shown lots of bracelets before I was asked whether I was looking for a necklace or a bracelet. I was looking for a necklace. A few minutes later, she asked my niece’s favourite colour. That is something else she should have find out at the beginning.

Step 3

Listen to the answers. I was mystery shopping some car dealers. The woman at reception asked me how much I wanted to spend and then went on to tell me about the cars without waiting to hear the answer.

Step 4

Show you are eager to help and have a can-do, will do attitude. Sometimes you may not be able to do what your customers ask. Do not think of reasons why you cannot do it. Think of what you can do for them. Your customers do not want to hear what you cannot do. They want to know what you can do.

Step 5

Show your customer you have the solution to their problem. If you do not have it, tell them where they can get it. Better yet, try to get it for them.

Step 6

Show your customers how to use your product or service so they can get the most value out of it.

A middle with substance leaves the customer thinking they were smart to come to see you because you took the time to understand their problem, find the solution and show them how to get the most from it. That is the kind of thinking that will bring them back.

The objective at the end is to send the customer away feeling like they want to come back. A strong ending leaves a lasting and positive impression. Here are four steps to creating a strong ending.

Step 1

Ask the customer whether they achieved what they came in to achieve. If you could not help them, tell them you are sorry you could not help them this time and ask them to come back so you can help them next time.

Step 2

Thank them for giving you the opportunity to help them.

Step 3

Invite them to come back. This would be a good time to give them a card with your name and contact details on it.

Step 4

Say goodbye. Note: Saying “Have a nice day,” or letting the customer just walk out does not create a lasting positive impression.

If all of this sounds too basic or too simple, go shopping. You will soon discover why getting the basics right is the key to success.

Forget About Customer Service

Forget about trying to deliver great customer service.  No customer wants service. What they want are results and that comes from creating a positive personalised experience.

Positive because the customer wants to enjoy themselves and feel valued while they do business with you. There are enough things that happen during a day to make us feel miserable. We do not need to go shopping to feel like that! Positive also because the customer gets results because you give them the assistance, and perhaps even the solution, they need. After all, that is why they came to you.

Personalised because business is a social activity between human beings. None of us wants to feel like a number or an object. Do not think about providing a service, making a sale or transacting with a customer. Think about being with a friend or a member of your family. Would you treat them in a robotic manner or with indifference? Remember, we do business with people we like. Do your team members behave in likable way?

Experience because that is what your customers have when they deal with you. They do not just make an enquiry, complete a purchase or acquire a product. They have an experience. If it is poor, they will not come back. If it is good, they might. If it is great, they will. Do you manage your customer’s experience to maximise the chances they will return or do you leave it to chance?

To understand how to deliver a positive personalised experience, it is useful to divide the customer experience into three parts: The beginning, middle and end. I know this sounds simple but, hey, business may be tough but it is not complicated!  

As any musician will tell you, to be successful you need a strong beginning and a strong end. The middle should be less intense otherwise the customer will feel they are getting the hard sell. Nevertheless, the middle has to have substance to it or the customer will have wasted their time.

The objective at the beginning is to attract the customer to the business and keep them there. It is the opportunity to build a relationship between yourself and another human being. Here are seven steps to creating a strong beginning.

Step 1

If you are not already near the customer, a strong beginning starts by approaching the customer. I recently watched saw a salesperson call out a greeting to a customer from the other end of the store and then walked even further away, leaving the customer to “browse.”

Step 2

Acknowledge the customer. I stood for several minutes in front of a sales assistant the other day and watched him put price stickers on CDs. He even looked up at me once and then returned to what he obviously thought was his real job.

Step 3

Make eye contact eye and smile.  The smile needs to be warm and genuine, not lukewarm and false. Look like you are pleased to see your customer. After all, you should be. They are paying your wages and producing your profits.

Step 4

Say, “Good morning (afternoon, evening),” “Hello,” or “Hi” in a firm voice with some enthusiasm so once again it looks like you are pleased to meet the customer. Please note, a strong greeting does NOT come from saying: “Are you right?” “Please hold.” “How ya goin?”

Step 5

Warmly welcome the customer into your place of business. After all, is that not how you want them to feel? The best way to welcome somebody is to use the word, as in: “Welcome to our store.”

Step 6

Personalise the greeting by introducing yourself (even if you are wearing a name tag), asking for the customer’s name. Then use it throughout the time you are with them. Always treat the customer with respect. Do not assume everybody wants to be called by their first name. When in doubt, err on the side of formality. Note: “mate,’ ‘doll,’ ‘buddy,’ ‘pal,’ and ‘bro’ are not people’s names.

Step 7

Show a personal interest in your customer. This is done by engaging the customer in small talk before getting down to business. This is a useful step because it breaks the ice and gets the customer accustomed to talking to you. The key to doing this successfully is to have an interesting opening line. Try to say something a little more imaginative than: “How’s your day going?”

These seven simple but often overlooked steps will create the impact needed to (a) establish rapport with your customer, (b) win their confidence, (c) set you apart from your competitors, and (d) make your business somewhere they would like to come to again.

Imagine a team member walking up to you, making eye contact, smiling and saying enthusiastically: “Hello. Welcome to Acme Consolidated. My name is Peter. May I ask your name? … It’s nice to meet you Mr Robinson. Isn’t it great to see the sun shining after all that rain? I was beginning to think I would need to grow webbed feet. I see you’ve been shopping for clothes. What did you buy?” Would you think that was a strong beginning to a having personalised positive experience? Would you already be thinking, this place is different?

Next month we will look at what you have to do to create a middle with substance and an ending with impact. Meanwhile, here is a tip for helping your team members understand how important these steps are. Turn the seven steps into a five point rating scale where 1 is very poor, 3 is average and 5 is very good and ask them to use this scale to rate how well the places they shop do each of these seven steps. After they present the results for a given business, ask them whether they would want to go back there again.

Until next time, good luck creating a positive personalised experience for your customers.

Why Not Practice?

If you were a music teacher, would you get your pupils to practice scales and songs to the point where they could play them well without thinking about what they were doing?

If you were a golf or tennis coach, would you get your students to practice swinging the club or racquet so they could do it correctly time and time again?

If you were coaching a sports team, would you get the team to practice set moves and key skills like passing the ball, shooting and tackling until they could do it correctly, every time, without thinking about it.

If you were teaching religious education, would you expect your students would learn things like the Lord’s Prayer off by heart?

Of course you would because you know that to do something well, you have to have over-learned it, so that it happens automatically.

As a manager do you expect your staff to practice how to interact to customers until they can do it well every time without thinking about it? Do you require them to learn what to say to a customer off by heart?

Would your customers notice a difference if you did?

Oh, and don’t tell me you wouldn’t want staff to memorise what to say because it would sound stilted. Left to their own devices, people say the same thing every time now without giving any thought to what they are saying (Are you right? How ya going? Have a nice day). If they are going to say the same thing over and over they may as well say something good.

I guess you have to decide whether it is important your staff learn how to look after your customers so it happens automatically every time.

The Worst Reason for Doing Something

There are many reasons why we do what we do but the poorest of them has got to be, "Because that is the way we always do it."  If that was a good reason for doing things we would still be lighting fires by rubbing two sticks together!

Saying you are doing something because you always do it is the feeblest justification I can think of and yet it is the one I hear most often.  I was having a haircut the other day and I was in a hurry. I wash my hair every morning and therefore was a little irritated that time I didn’t really have was being wasted washing it again. I asked the hairdresser if was necessary to wash someone’s hair before cutting it. "I don't know," came the reply. "That's the way we always do it."

Even well qualified professionals are guilty of using this reasoning. I asked a professional engineer who quoted on doing some work for me why his quote was exclusive of GST when things sold to consumers always include GST. "I don't know," he said. "That's the way we always do it."

For more than two decades we have recognized we live in a rapidly changing world where change is the only constant. For many years it has become accepted wisdom that what worked for us yesterday might make little difference today and could be the cause of our downfall tomorrow.  Yet we persist on doing the things we have always done.  If that was not bad enough, we continue doing them without questioning why we are doing them.

What do you do because you have always done it? Is it still worth doing? If so, can we give the customer a better reason for doing it than: “That’s the way we always do it?”

The One Question To Ask

If you were to ask your customers only one question, what would it be? Which one answer would tell you what you need to know to run a successful business?

The purpose of a business is to attract and keep customers and since your existing customers are worth more to you than new customers, the number one priority must be customer retention. But how do you keep your customers coming back for more? By providing them with an outstanding customer experience. This is why the topic of the moment in the business world is customer experience management. The first step to managing the experience your customers have when they do business with you in to understand what, in their opinion, makes a great customer experience. Therefore the one question we need to ask is, “What makes a customer experience a great one for you?”

If you got your staff to ask your customers that question, not only would you learn what you have to do to create a great a great experience, but you would engage them in the process and they would begin to understand why managing the customer experience is so important.

Here’s a tip: Require each staff member to ask between 4 and 8 customers that question every day for two or three weeks and to record the answers. What you learn will be both educational and inspirational and the process will take your staff another step on the journey to become customer driven.

Why Do We make Price The Main Issue?

Why do we insist on making price the main issue?

I shopped for a gift for my niece the other day and the first place the salesperson took me was to the sales counter. I gave absolutely no signals that price was a consideration in this purchase.

I am a Type 2 Diabetic and yesterday I went to a Chemist to ask if a certain medication had any side effects. The drug is not covered by the government so it would cost me about $110 a month. The chemist tried to persuade me that I would be better off taking insulin instead of paying for the pills. Does she really think I would prefer to stick myself with a needle twice a day in order to save less than $4?

Do your staff make price the main issue - even when it's not one for your customers?

Ask, Listen and Learn

I have been doing some mystery shopping lately and have been struck by two observations.

The first is how bad it is out there. You will remember last month’s column about being ignored at Bond and Bond and Farmers. Since then, I have been to look at boats with a friend who is thinking of spending about $100,000. It was a Saturday morning. Three marine brokers were closed.

One marine broker who was open should have been closed. When we walked in, the salesman was sitting in a chair behind a desk. He greeted us but did not get up to shake hands or introduce himself. When he found out I was originally from Canada, he was more interested in talking about a plane crash near Winnipeg than answering questions about the boats he had advertised on the wall. When we asked to see three boats, there was a great deal of shuffling through papers and discussions with a colleague about where the boats were. It turned out all of them were at other marinas in the Auckland area.

One marine broker who was open should have been closed. When we walked in, the salesman was sitting in a chair behind a desk. He greeted us but did not get up to shake hands or introduce himself. When he found out I was originally from Canada, he was more interested in talking about a plane crash near Winnipeg than answering questions about the boats he had advertised on the wall. When we asked to see three boats, there was a great deal of shuffling through papers and discussions with a colleague about where the boats were. It turned out all of them were at other marinas in the Auckland area.

One brokerage had a sales dock. My friend and I walked up and down the dock looking at the boats, reading the information about the boats nicely displayed on a stand by each boat. We even walked onto the boats in the hope of being noticed but nobody came out from the office to talk to us. I walked back up the ramp to the office and found the salesman sitting at a desk. I stood behind him and, looking out he window said, “So, you can see the sales dock from here.”

“Yep,” he replied.

I told him my friend and I would like to look at one of the boats. He said that would be fine but he needed to turn the phones over – whatever that means. He did not introduce himself nor did he ask any questions about why we might want to look at that particular boat.

You have to give people a reason to buy from you and those kinds of experiences are not going to do it. By contrast, I was speaking recently at a sales conference in Australia. During the discussion, one fellow said he always gave new customers his mobile phone number and told them that if they had any questions or problems, they should call him directly and not ring the call centre. I could see from the expression on his colleagues’ faces they did not think that was a very good idea because he was opening himself up to being constantly “interrupted” by his customers. At the awards dinner that night, he won six awards including Sales Executive of The Year.

My second observation is that even the good salespeople are capable of answering questions but do not seem very interested asking any. This problem is not confined to the marine industry. I have mystery shopped car yards, retailers and other types of businesses lately and found the same thing. In the ‘good’ companies, staff are generally knowledgeable enough to answer the customer’s questions but rarely ask any of their own.

This tendency to be reactive creates several problems for the customer. First, it is hard work asking all those questions, trying to anticipate issues that might crop up in the future and generally thinking of what you need to ask about.

Secondly, we make dangerous assumptions if we do not ask questions. When I mystery shopped a car dealer I told the salesman I wanted to buy a car for my teenage son. “The cheap cars are over there,” he told me, pointing to an area of the lot.
“Where do you keep the BMWs?” I asked.

The third problem with not asking questions is that customers are always right but often wrong. Customers buy because they have a problem or want to avoid having a problem. They are always right about their problem. They know they have one and they know what it is. Admittedly, they may, or could have, other problems they do not know about but they do have at least one problem they know about or they would not be in the marketplace in the first place.

What customers are often wrong about is the solution to their problem. They do not understand your business as well as you do and so customers may, and often do, ask for the wrong solution. They do not know what other solutions are available and the pros and cons of each. Your job is to look past the customer's request for a particular solution and ask questions to understand the problem they are trying to solve. That way you can affirm their request or suggest a better alternative. If you do not ask questions, you are just an order-taker and there is no shortage of those in the marketplace.

But perhaps the biggest problem with not asking questions is that if you do not understand the customer’s needs, you cannot compete on value. If you do not compete on value, you will have to compete on price.  And we all know where that road leads!
So that I practice what I preach, let me ask you some questions. What reasons do you give your customers to shop with you? Do your staff ask questions or fill orders? Do they understand the need to ask questions? Do they know which questions to ask? 

Could these be good questions to discuss at your next staff meeting?

Helping You Manage Your Customer Experience

As you know, the quality of the experience customers get when they do business with you is one of the biggest factors influencing whether they buy from you again and whether they recommend you to others.  But very few businesspeople actually manage the customer experience.  In fact, most don’t even think about it! Ironically, most of us put more effort into managing the experience guests have when the come to visit us in our homes than we do into managing the experience our customers have when they do business with us.

If you are serious about managing the experience your customers have, you will be interested in a newly-formed valuable resource called customer experience management New Zealand (www.cemnz.org.nz).

customer experience management New Zealand is a community of businesspeople dedicated to providing business leaders with the knowledge, tools and resources they need to turn their customers into loyal raving fans.

customer experience management New Zealand is free to join and members can simply register on the cemNZ website (www.cemnz.org.nz) to begin to enjoy the benefits from this growing resource.

While you're at it, join our Linkedin Group too.

One Year of Blogging

As many of you know, I have been blogging off and on for over a year. Because I cannot remember what I've written about in the past, I just put together a list of all my blogs. It occurred to me that you might find it useful to look at too.

Here are the topics in order from the most recent to the earliest.

How to turn difficult customers into raving fans

The knife-edge we live on

Customers are outraged and managers delusional

8 Lessons form a winner

How easy do you make it for your customers?

Is the customer always right?

It’s not complicated

Unhappy customers threaten profits

Some key differences

Ask and learn

You don’t want customers

Are your "eyes" too close together?

Today I fired my insurance broker

Could I please buy something?

Customers as learners

Rising expectations

Businesses must dramatically improve the way they look after their customers

It’s not rocket science

It’s just common sense

Customer Service is a matter of personal choice

Now here’s an interesting thought

The laws of customer retention

Turn your customers into Believers

The power of a simple single idea

More evidence loyalty programmes need improving

Effective Managers know the power of repetition

How do your customers react to your actions?

Business is the activity of creating value

Your employees could sabotage your promotions

New World is New Zealand’s best supermarket for customer service

What business are you really in?

Around the world customers expect more but think they are getting less

Marketers don’t understand women

Word of mouth is the strongest influence on where customers shop

Make it easy for your customers to talk to you

Many loyalty programmes are ineffective

How to turn a good customer experience into a great one