Customer service is a matter of personal choice.

The kind of experience your customers have depends on the choices you make.

Companies do not set out to provide their customers with bad experiences,  but the people running these companies often make choices that result in customers having a bad experience. Senior managers, for example,  make a choice to provide no service rather than customer service (and make no mistake, self-service is no service). They have chosen to reduce the money they spend looking after you and to spend it on advertisements convincing you to spend your money with them. These people have chosen to say, in effect, to their customers, “Do it yourself, mate. We are not hiring people to do it for you.”

The issue is not confined to senior managers, of course. The same applies to front-line team members who choose to say, “I don’t know,” rather than “I’ll find out and get back to you.” Or who choose to make life easy for themselves by doing as little as possible rather than helping their customers by going the extra mile. Or who choose to be unfriendly, or even surly, rather than to act pleasantly. Or who choose to make excuses when something goes wrong rather than say, sorry. Or who choose to disrespect their customers by not saying please or thank you.

 

Customer service is a matter of personal choice.

When you touch your customers, at what Jan Carlsson called moments of truth over 30 years ago, whether your customer has a good or bad experience depends on how you behave and how you behave is based on the choices you make. You choose to look after your customer or you choose to look after yourself. You choose to go the extra mile or to do as little as possible. Whether your customer gets a good or bad experience depends on the choices you make.

What choices are you making and how do these affect your customers?

Now, here’s an interesting thought.

 Imagine there was someone in your life who liked you so much that every month they deposited a sum of money into your bank account that was equal to what you and your partner are currently earning. And imagine if this went on month after month. Eventually, you might start to believe this money would always come in and so you would retire from work and spend all of your time socialising with your friends and enjoying your hobbies.

One day, this person rings you up and says they would be in your neighbourhood the following week and would like to visit you. What would your response be? I don’t imagine you would tell them you were busy next week and, in fact, for the rest of the month so would next month be OK? I don’t even think you say next week would be OK as long as it was Wednesday afternoon because you had things planned for the rest of the week. I think you’d say, “You bet! I’d love to see you. What time would suit you?”

What would you do between the time you’d talked to them on the telephone and when they were due to visit? I suspect you’d clean the house, sweep the paths, mow the lawns and wash the car. On the day of the visit, you’d probably put the kids in the bath tub, scrub them red, towel them dry, dress them in their best clothes and line them up and say, “On your best behaviour or on your bikes!”

When it came time for the person to come, would you be at the other end of the house with the TV cranked up so loud it was hard to hear the doorbell? And when you finally did hear it ring, would you shout out, “Your visit is important to us but we’re kind of busy right now. Please wait, you are No 1 in the queue?”

I don’t think so. I think you’d be right behind the door and when you heard their footsteps on the path, you would open the door before they could ring the bell. There would be a big smile on your face and you’d say, “How nice to see you!” And you would mean it. You would invite them into the house, offer to hang up their coat, suggest they sit in the most comfortable chair in the room and offer them something to eat and drink.

You would ask them how they were and you would be really pleased when they said they were fine because you want the money to continue! You would be very interested in what they had to say and you would show that you were listening. You would ask questions and pay attention to the answers. If they said something you did not agree with, you wouldn’t say, “Well that’s not right!” You would just smile and nod. And if they asked you what you thought, you would be very tactful and polite.

Your customers are your benefactors!

In fact, you would do absolutely everything in your power to give this person a great experience because you know this person is your benefactor. And that’s what customers are. They are your benefactors. They pay your wages and 100% of your company's profits come from your customers. In fact, unless you are losing money, every dollar needed to keep your business going and you in a job comes from your customers.

I wonder what effect it would have on your business if you treated your customers as if they were guests in your home?

The Laws of Customer Retention

Most of us understand The First Law of Customer Retention, which states if you do something that pleases your customers you give them a reason to keep doing business with you. We even understand the First Corollary to this law that says the more we please our customers, the more reasons they have to return. It seems, however, that few of us understand The Second Law of Customer Retention which states if we stop doing something that pleases our customers we do not just remove that reason, we give them a reason to take their business elsewhere. Of course, the more reasons we give them to leave, the less likely it is they will stay. 


Would your customers say your business is following The First Law of Customer Retention or the Second?

Turn Your Customers Into Believers

The aim in business is to have profitable customers who stay with you for a long time. After all, if every one of your customers was profitable to you and they all stayed a very long time, you would have an extremely successful business.

The best way to achieve this goal is to turn your customers into believers. Believers buy. Believers come back. And believers tell others.

Getting your customers to believe in you and your products is not an easy task because trust between customers and the companies they deal with is at an all time low.

Certainly, satisfying your customers is not enough to turn them into believers nor is it enough to make them loyal. When you satisfy a customer, you simply give they what they expect. When people just get what they expect, they are not impressed enough to become believers, loyalists or evangelists. Nearly 20 years ago, Xerox did research showing that “Totally satisfied” customers were six times more likely to re-purchase than customers who were simply “satisfied.”

The best way to turn your customers into believers is to create a customer experience so positive, so powerful and so outstanding your customers believe if they did not do business with you, they would be missing out. Then they will trust you. Then they will be loyal. Then they will be evangelists for your business telling others just how fantastic you are.

Best of all, the one thing they will not worry about is price!

The Power of a Simple Single Idea

What does everyone get at The Warehouse? That’s right, a bargain.

And why does everyone in New Zealand know that? Because we have all been told many times over the past few years. This demonstrates the power of one single, simple, clear message delivered often, in the same way, over a period of time.

There is one single, simple, clear message you should be giving your staff throughout this year to make your business even more successful:

This is the most important message to give your staff because 100% of your profits come from your customers, as does the money to pay their wages. You and your staff need to be thinking about this single, simple, clear idea constantly because without your customers you would have no business and they would have no jobs.

I know all that seems common sense but usually people think about anything but, “Our customers are our business.” For example, lawyers think about laws, cases and documents; builders think about plans and houses; salespeople think about their products; people in local government think about rules and regulations; librarians think about books; and managers think about processes, policies and profits. It is human nature for people to think about what they do and not who they are doing it for. As a result, not enough time is spent asking questions and listening to understand what the customer is going to do with what we are giving them. It also makes it very hard for us to put ourselves in our customer’s shoes.

More Evidence Loyalty Programmes Need Improving

Nearly half (49 percent) of all loyalty program members never or rarely take advantage of the benefits of the programme they belong to when shopping online, and 78 percent said easy access to loyalty memberships would make them more inclined to use those privileges online, according to new research from ACI Worldwide, reported in a recent issue of CRM Magazine.


Many people say they simply don’t have the wallet space to efficiently use rewards cards, says Rob Seward, senior industry marketing manager at ACI. He suggests retailers consider consolidating loyalty programs onto a single device such as a smart card or mobile app.

The study also found 52 percent of American consumers would prefer a single card that could hold all their memberships, 33%s said they would prefer to have a consolidated key chain, while 17 percent advocated a mobile app that could access all their customer retail loyalty programs.

Effective Managers Know the Power of Repetition

Managers who deliberately repeat themselves are more effective at getting things done according to research done by Professors Tsedal Neeley (Harvard Business School) and Paul Leonardi (Northwestern University). Neeley and Leonardi headed a team who followed 13 managers in six companies for more than 250 hours, recording every communication the managers sent and received. The researchers found that managers who sent the same message two or more times moved their projects along faster and more smoothly.