Language

The words we use matter.  If we are careless in the language that we use, it indicates a carelessness in thinking.  The language we choose reflects our thinking.  Similarly, the words we use can subtly change our thinking.  Consider the following:

• When we travel, we aren’t travelers in a foreign land but foreigners in a traveled land.
• An employee or a customer who is wheelchair bound isn't a handicap or a handicapped person, but a person with a handicap.
• When we are addressing a customer service issue, we are not dealing with a soon-to-be former customer with a complaint but a customer who was not satisfied.  Or if you are a glass half full kind of person, we are dealing with a customer who is giving us a chance to improve.

To some extent we are talking about semantics.  But how we label things makes a difference in how we think and act toward those things.  In a recent blog, I shared a quote by Abraham Lincoln: "We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses."

Would you rather deal with problems or opportunities?  Would you rather be managing a response or leading your team to the answer?  Would you rather be a disruptor or a change agent?

Related articles

• Selfie

When No One is Looking

Customer service happens when no one is looking.  When an employee interacts with a customer while they are being watched by a supervisor, it isn't customer service, its obedience.  Customer service requires initiative.

Initiative happens when you let staff know they are trusted.  Trusted to address customer needs and concerns.  Trusted to make mistakes.  Especially if those mistakes are made because they are trying: to help a customer; meet a goal; or address an organizational challenge.

Employees know they are trusted by the way their leaders treat them and react to them, especially when they make mistakes.  If failure is treated as a punishable offense versus a step toward success, then staff will not feel trusted and will learn not to take initiative.  If mistakes are met with anger and loud voices versus analysis and education, that signals a lot to the person who made the mistake.  And everyone they talk to and work with.

On the surface, customer service is a simple thing.  It is about being polite, pleasant and professional with customers and working to address their needs.

Excellent customer service goes deeper, however.  It is about anticipating the needs of the customer and addressing them before they ask.  It is about quickly and efficiently resolving customer problems when needs aren't met to the satisfaction of the customer.  To achieve this, it takes a staff member who is actively engaged in the success of the organization.  A person who takes the initiative to understand customers and has the creativity and personality to positively engage customers.  Excellent customer service cannot be done simply by following a checklist.

Ultimately, excellent customer service on the front lines, something every organization should strive for, starts with the way things are handled in the back room.

Or else

I had a boss once who would ask "Is this the best you can do?" whenever you handed him some work.  If you answered no, he handed the work back without waiting for excuses.  If you answered yes, you knew that it had better be your best work.  The "or else" was never spoken of, articulated or, honestly, thought a lot about.  He was just the type of guy that you knew there would be an "or else" that you wouldn't like.

Sometimes, when I am experiencing exceptionally bad customer service, I think that the person delivering that service must not be thinking about the "or else."

The "or else's" for bad customer service are many:

• the sale could be lost
• the customer could never come back
• the former customer could tell others about the bad service she got and convince others not to come back
• other employees could see that bad service is tolerated and some of them may start taking the easy way out (good customer service usually takes a little effort and initiative)
• The customers of those employees could stop coming back and stop making purchases
• The business, facing declining sales and lowering public perception, could be forced to cut expenses
• The sales person who started this all could lose their job.
• The company is forced to close because the smaller sales force makes it impossible to be responsive to customer needs
• The industry is struck with rumors of decline, sending stock prices plummeting and closing more businesses
• The economy, facing a sudden and unpredicted business sector collapse goes into a tailspin, and then..
• Well...you get the idea.

I am not seriously suggesting some sort of customer service butterfly effect (where a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world and creates a hurricane elsewhere in the world).  I am proposing that customer service, good and bad, DOES have ripple effects that are difficult to predict.  I am saying that the small gestures, like a smile or a courtesy to a customer, CAN come back to you multiplied many times over.  I am suggesting that we would be a lot better off if we each asked ourselves if this was the best we could do.  

I am also recommending that we consider the "or else."

Related articles

• The Art of Customer Service
• The Many P's of Marketing: People

Wounds

Skinned knees heal.  Broken arms mend.  Wounded feelings and damaged trust don't often repair themselves as easily or reliably.

In business, as in  relationships, you cannot count on nature or time to heal wounds.  Despite the saying that time heals all wounds, smart  businesses seek out customers (or former customers) who are feeling wounded.  They seek them out and talk to them.

Talking to disappointed customers has many benefits:

• You have an opportunity to right the wrong.  This can often turn a bad experience into a good one for the customer.
• You learn quickly what isn't going right so you can address the problem before it disappoints more customers.
•  By reaching out to customers, and making this a routine practice, you help to evolve your culture into one that is more caring and customer-focused.
• After you have shown a customer that you care enough to learn about their problems and concerns and take steps to address them, you are likely to increase the loyalty of that customer.
• You are also likely to turn negative word-of-mouth into positive testimonial.  This is powerful in two ways.  First you get someone talking positively about you and your brand.  Second, because negative word-of-mouth spreads many times faster than positive word-of-mouth, you stem a tide of mind-changing bad publicity.

Often times, when you take time to listen to customers' concerns, you will find that the problems are not ones that you were aware of before you listened.  And sometimes they aren't hard to fix.  Furthermore, you will find that most customers understand that you cannot change everything.  They will understand that even when you can change something, you might not be able to make the change in time to impact their personal experience.  They also understand that because you took the time to listen to them, that they are important to you.

I had a boss and mentor once who said that the customers who complained were our greatest friends.  "They are taking their time to tell us where we made a mistake and how we can get better.  We pay consultants lots of money for the same advice!"

Related articles

• 10 Ways to Make Customers Fall in Love with Your Business
• "Please complain"

The cost of a smile

It costs nothing to smile at a customer, yet the price for not smiling can be immense.

It costs nothing to listen to a suggestion or a complaint of an employee, yet the cost of not listening can be that smile for a customer.

Excellent customer service often starts in the break rooms and meeting rooms of an organization.  Someone who feels respected and valued in their employment is much more likely to treat customers the same way.

So in reality, the cost of a smile is the time and effort it takes to treat employees respectfully and professionally.  

Seems like a small price to pay.

Vacations every day!

In North America, we find ourselves in spring break vacation season. That got me to thinking...

When we travel on vacation, things often are difficult and/or stressful: car troubles, delayed or cancelled flights, confusing directions, motel showers, bad food, cab rides and the list goes on. We have to decide what to pack, hope we actually remember everything we intended to pack, make travel arrangements, pay a lot of money for things that we already have at home (like a comfortable bed) and generally displace ourselves from the comfort and routine of our lives. So why do we consider vacation travel fun and desirable?

It seems to me that there are two reasons. One is it is a new, fresh experience. We get to break the mold. Get away from the every day. We see new things, meet new people, have exciting new experiences. Even if our vacation destination is a familiar one, it is different from the every day things that are a part of our "regular" lives.

The second reason that vacations are desirable is that on vacation, the focus is on you. Most of us have to serve others (customers, bosses, teachers, parents and children) in our daily lives. On vacation, we get to do something for ourselves for a change.  People serve us!

Wouldn't it be wonderful, if our customers got "vacation-style" interactions with us on an every day basis? If we could make our customers feel that they are the center of attention when they deal with us and they have new, interesting, and exciting experiences when they deal with us, doesn't it stand to reason that their interactions with us will be more desired and sought out? And, like a vacation, doesn't it stand to reason that the customer who experiences "vacation-style" interactions will be willing to put up with the occasional mistake or inconvenience in order to have those interactions?

We do when we travel.

Talking together

Lately, we seem more concerned with having our devices talk to each other than we do with having our colleagues talk to each other.  With the explosion of wireless computing and the Swiss army knife of the 21st century, the smart phone, featuring more and more capabilities and tools, we have more and more ways to connect with colleagues and customers and fewer and fewer reasons to talk to people.

While I believe in the efficiency of webinars, conferences and conference calls, I also have multi-tasked my way through all of them enough times to know that they are not usually the best way to have an engaged conversation.  As with so many things related to communications, the closer you can get to face-to-face, one-on-one conversation, the more impact and persuasion you can have.  The closer we can get to one-on-one conversation the more likely we are to make a connection with the other party in the conversation.  

A friend of mine sends out emails about her business on a pretty regular basis.  She was telling me that she had recently started personalizing some of the emails to key customers.  The response from those customers was remarkable, she told me with a bit of amazement.  While not everyone made a purchase, many people felt the need to respond to her; to reconnect with her.  They saw these emails not as advertisements, which they essentially were, but as one-on-one communications.  As a personal message.  They felt compelled to respond.  They felt compelled to strengthen the relationship.

There are ways that technology can help us approximate the one-on-one conversation.  For a while, one of the biggest concepts in marketing was the idea of mass customization.  The theory was that technology would allow us to use the convenience of mass marketing but with the impact of a personalized, customized message.  While I suspect there aren't many people anymore who feel that a mail merged letter is the same as a hand-written note, it does make a letter seem a bit less like a form letter and a bit more like the sender wants to really communicate.  Technology allows us to customize what information a customer or prospect receives, essentially allowing us to customize our interaction on a one-on-one level.

We need to be mindful of what we are doing and not let the technology seduce us too much.  For example, think about how too many people use what is now a pretty dusty technology, PowerPoint.  Too many speakers continue to pour all of their energy into creating detailed, bullet-riddled PowerPoint presentations.  They end up giving their speech facing the slides because they don't want to miss any of the precious facts they have loaded onto each slide.  As Seth Godin says in his blog post titled "Really Bad PowerPoint," "countless innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way."  Wordy, bullet-laden presentations rarely communicate as much as the creator hopes they will.  When a speaker is speaking to the screen, he cannot be talking with the audience.  Also, people can't see all the brilliance on the slide if their eyes are closed.

Similarly, some organizations confuse the use of social media as a strategy as opposed to a media option.  This results in companies focusing unwarranted attention on generating likes, or followers, or repins instead of focusing on the true mission of the organization or the brand, generating sales.  Getting someone to push a "Like" button is not a conversation or a connection.  It may be an invitation to start a conversation, depending what scheme you used to get that person to push that "Like" button.  We really need to be focusing on connections, real connections, with customers and prospects and other key audiences.  We need to be finding ways to talk together.

A colleague of mine told me recently that if an email exchange goes past three emails without the issue getting resolved, she picks up the phone and calls the person.  The issue rarely goes past one phone call.  There is nothing more powerful than talking directly with a person.

Related articles

• The Swiss Army Knife of Our Time

Press #@&^% for Customer Service

Yesterday, I tried to get a simple question answered about a charge on my credit card.  I called the company issuing the charge with a straightforward request but one that didn't fit neatly into the categories provided on the charging company's voicemail system.

I am typically pretty willing to navigate through a voicemail system to find an answer to my inquiry.  I even find some of the more carefully constructed auto-response systems a pleasure to use as I can get an answer to my question quickly and with machine-like efficiency.

But this system was one of those circular machine hells that kept sending me back to the same place over and over and over and over again.  I tried calling back during normal business hours in the hope that I might be directed to a customer service agent.  No such luck.  I tried the website (as repeatedly suggested) but couldn't access the information I needed because I needed to have information that I could only get from the website in order to get into the website.  Or at least that is how I felt.

Ultimately, what started as a simple request for information about a charge from the issuing company ended up with me reversing the charges with my credit card company.  It also ended with me vowing to think twice or three times before doing business with that company again.

I understand that automated systems can save a company time and money.  I also understand that a poorly designed automated system can a company from having to deal with pesky customer problems and complaints.  But probably not in the way they intended.


The Many P's of Marketing: Pause

Pause:  I have had fun with the Many P's of Marketing and have more P-words to explore the breadth and depth of the world of marketing.  Nevertheless, I think it is a good time to pause this series and write about other things in this blog.  I will come back to it.  I will bring in more guest bloggers.  But for now, I have things to say that don't start with P!