A lot of companies – from sole proprietors to huge multinationals – across a wide swath of industries use customer service as a key differentiator. If you do, and prominently display that information on your website and in your marketing materials, be sure you can live up to the expectations you set and the promises you make.
If you do, your customers will wax rhapsodic about you to their friends, clients and vendors – and become one of your best sources of new customers. Word-of-mouth marketing by a rabidly happy client base is probably the easiest way to grow your business. Your sales funnel will be full of prospective clients who don’t need any convincing – they are already more than willing to sign up.
A great example of this comes courtesy of Peter Shankman, who received the best customer service ever from Morton’s the Steakhouse over the summer. Consider his blog post a case study in what to do for your customers. Peter tweeted while boarding a flight home that he really wanted a nice Morton’s steak for dinner – and it was hand-delivered to him by waitstaff when he landed at Newark Airport. And then he blogged about it.
If, however, you don’t live up to the customer service expectations you set, you will be bad-mouthed to everyone within earshot – and you could find your company written up in a blog post for all the wrong reasons. Here’s my case study:
There is a huge cable/phone/Internet company headquartered in Philadelphia. Perhaps you are familiar with them – perhaps you are a customer, because FiOS is not available where you live and there are too many trees around your home for DirectTV to work.
Or, perhaps you are trying to become a customer, but first the company loses the records of your initial appointment, then one technician after another fails to show up, and repeated calls to customer service – including escalating to a supervisor – fail to produce a technician at the stated appointment time – three times in a row.
If, like me, you work from home and rely on Internet service to work, but are suddenly trapped at home waiting for someone to show up when they say they will, and are trying to work via BlackBerry while losing billable hours that now number in the dozens…well, that is not a happy customer service experience.
Imagine treating your customers like this. How many customers would you have? If I did this to my clients, I would be living in a cardboard box under a highway overpass, and I will go ahead and assume that the same would be true for you.
So, here are three super-simple ways to provide stellar customer service:
Keep your promises. It really is as simple as that: If you say you can or will do something, do it. As your company grows and you add employees, put together a standard workflow process for your employees to follow so they can keep the promises you make to your customers.
Be proactive. No matter how hard we try, sometimes things come up that prevent us from fulfilling our promises. That’s life. When this happens, be proactive and contact your customer immediately with an apology, a status update and maybe a small discount for the inconvenience.
Empower decision-making. When you start putting a customer service department together, make sure everyone is empowered to make decisions that can fix an issue or problem as soon as humanly possible.
Image courtesy: creative design agency Arrae
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