customer service

your customers know, do you?

I was recently reminded (yet again) of the importance of experiencing our systems and processes from the customer’s perspective. Of really understanding the customer experience.

We think we know what our customer goes through, we design our processes and systems to serve them. After all, we use the process all the time. The challenge is that we know how it is supposed to work, we know all its subtleties and nuances, AND we know the shortcuts. In many cases, we never experience the systems and processes we require our customers to use.

A quick example from my own life. A minor part of my job is overseeing a small company library. Employees can find a book on our computer system, check it out, and it will be sent to them via interoffice mail.

So here’s my embarrassing confession. For all my harping on the world about the need for great customer service, I have apparently never actually used the system to check out a book. As the library is 20 feet from my office it almost seems silly to go through the whole process. Instead of going through the whole process, I’d just go grab a book and mark it checked out in the system..

Then, while fixing a minor glitch, I decided to see the whole process from the customer’s point of view. I discovered that the automated emails they received when checking out a book made absolutely no sense. The emails were based on templates used to sign up for classes so they had statements like: Your supervisor has approved you to attend The Strategy Book. Ugh! Their supervisor had nothing to do with it and they weren’t going to attend a book. Fail.

It has been corrected, but it really bothers me because I know better. I know to routinely test processes. But I didn’t. It’s an important reminder that the little things really, really matter.

Think about it:

  • When was the last time you applied at your company, set up benefits, tried to change important personal information? Not using your administrator rights, but the way an actual applicant or employee would?
  • When was the last time you experienced the sales process from start to finish? Not just your part, but right up to when the customer has it in hand. Have you ever tried dealing with your own customer service or returns departments?
  • When was the last time you tried to become a customer of your company? What barriers made it more difficult than it should be?

The only way to find the roadblocks, weirdness, and hassles is to go experience it ourselves. My own situation was minor, but served as a reminder that the only way you’re really going to discover the little things is to experience the process, not as the customer is supposed to, but how the customer actually does.

 

retention is easier

Quick question is it easier and cheaper to: 1) get new customers; or 2) keep existing customers? Obviously, it’s easier to keep existing customers. They know where to find you, what you offer, your level of service, etc. They already know that pros and cons of doing business with you and choose to do business with you anyway. Getting new customers requires making them aware of your business and what you offer and them convincing them to come visit and then convincing them to buy something and then demonstrating enough value through price or service that they choose to come back.

So why, why, why do businesses put so much emphasis on getting new customers, often at the expense of existing customers? Some industries in particular seem to have a business model that is solely focused on getting new customers from their competitors while ignoring their former customers who have been seduced away by a competitor. Huh? I see this most in subscription based businesses: cable/satellite TV, mobile phones, etc. The thought seems to be once you sign up you are captive and therefore require no attention. They are too busy trying to woo dissatisfied customers from the competition to worry about their own dissatisfied customers. They confuse contract induced commitment with satisfaction and loyalty.

Likewise, is it easier and cheaper to retain existing employees or to find and hire new ones? If retention is easier and cheaper, do we treat employees like we want them to stick around, like they don’t have a choice and have to stick around, or do we treat them like we don’t care at all?

It’s been said that the customer experience will never exceed the employee experience. What are your employees experiencing? Are they treated as well as we would want to be treated as customers? If we gave our customers the level of support, attention, and communication that we give our employees, would we still be in business?

Let’s spin this around: how do you want your best customers treated? What needs to be done to provide employees with the same level of internal support and service?

tale of two burritos

Customer service makes or breaks a business and good enough just isn’t. This weekend, I ended up having burritos from two competing franchises. Let’s call them Good Burrito and Better Burrito. Both offer super fresh ingredients, make them with specifically the ingredients and toppings you ask for, are pretty quick, and are very tasty. I never really thought about the differences until sampling them back to back.

Good Burrito asked what toppings I wanted and shuffled me from person to person as the burrito moved down the line. By the end of the line, three different people had contributed to my dinner. Henry Ford would be proud of the assembly line efficiency. Better Burrito had one person who put my food together and what a difference that one person made.

Supergregarious, he seemed to truly be interested in my day. How was my Saturday going, was I working or off, where did I work, did I like it there? When adding ingredients he’d brag on them a little: These vegetables are great, we cook them with… You can’t go wrong with that salsa, it’s great on everything…

A couple of important points. This took NO MORE time, in fact it was probably quicker because I didn’t have to repeat what I wanted like I did when getting passed from person to person at Good Burrito. He never got bogged down in the conversation. I never felt like I was being interrogated. It never felt fake or forced. Instead he gave the impression that he was really interested in my day and in making me the perfect burrito.

Then when I got to the register to pay I asked to get a brownie. The woman at the register (also superfriendly) said, “Let me find you a good one. They put the old ones on top.” And she dug through the basket until she found one. It looked like all the others, but she proclaimed it worthy. When I decided to get a brownie to take home for my wife, she dug through the basket again.

Here’s the most important point: Whether they cared about me, my day, and my lunch doesn’t matter. What matters is that they made me feel like they did. It took no more time, cost no more money, and made all the difference.

The HR and business lessons I take from this:

Hire right! Here’s the secret to hiring people: hire people who give a damn. Nothing else matters unless they care. If they care, the rest is largely irrelevant.  I’ll take under qualified people who care over qualified but apathetic people any day. Qualified and they give a damn? Score! I suspect that the guy making my burrito was following a semi-scripted patter. But he was so fluid and did it so well that it came across as very authentic. And, he was clearly a very outgoing person and a good fit for a customer facing role. The woman at the register went out of her way to find a good brownie. It’s hard to train people to care or go above and beyond. Much easier to hire for it.

Train right. Again, I suspect that much of it was patter, but done so well it felt natural, not forced. That requires a lot of practice, role playing, feedback, more practice, etc.

Think twice about your dress code. Employees at both places were clean and well groomed. Except that the three workers I saw at Better Burrito had long hair (male), blond dreadlocks (female), purple hair (female), and a heavy emphasis on tattoos and face piercings. And they were supernice, not too cool for you, not angsty, not indifferent. Let’s see, person who gives a damn and has nose rings or one who is unpierced and indifferent? Hmmm, easy choice.

Sustained business performance requires great customer service. Great customer services requires great people. Great people requires an intense focus on hiring right and training well. That requires leadership that truly gets the DIRECT connection between people and performance.

The final lesson? Great customer service trounces good customer service every time. Good enough customer service never is.

no more surprises

Nobody likes to be surprised by bad news. Surprises can be a career limiting event. From this day forward, do all in your humanly power to make sure that two types of people are never, ever surprised:

1. Your boss. Your job is to make your manager’s life easier. The #1 way to make their life (and your life) more difficult is for them to be surprised or blindsided by what you have done or not done. We will all make mistakes and drop the ball from time to time and the first step to retribution is making sure your boss isn’t surprised.

2. Your customers. Your job is to make your customer’s life easier. Nobody buys from someone who makes their life more difficult. Surprises make things difficult. Changes happen, there are things outside our control. Customers are far, far more forgiving if they know about potential issues in advance. Delivering bad news in advance is difficult, but letting them call to complain after being surprised by bad news is a far more challenging situation.

customer service: if you want a 10, do 10 work

You want your employees to do well, right? Of course, and you know that you can’t manage what you can’t measure so you set up some way of measuring their performance. And then you discover that you truly get what you measure, regardless of whether that’s what you actually wanted or not.

A salesperson recently revealed the disconnect between measured and desired outcomes when a co-worker purchased a car a couple of weeks ago. The salesperson’s parent company has a big focus on customer service and providing an outstanding experience. Each customer is surveyed after the sale and any rating lower than a 10 (the highest possible) drew negative attention for both the sales person and the dealer.

On the surface this sounds great. You can just imagine the company saying that they want every customer to have a 10 experience so that’s what they will measure and reward for. The problem – for this salesperson, at least – is that the focus shifted from providing an 10 experience to getting a 10. This is key: the focus shifted from the customer’s experience to the salesperson’s ratings.

This sounds similar, but it is very different. Because the salesperson was so worried about his ratings, he never bothered to provide service worth rating. I need to mention that she is one of the kindest, non-confrontational, charitable people one could hope to meet. She does not gripe or complain maliciously, yet had little good to say about the salesperson. Some highlights of my co-worker’s experience:

The car was being shipped because what she wanted wasn’t in stock the day it was purchased. Rather than keeping her posted, she had to constantly hunt down and badger the salesperson to find out the status of her order.

Whenever she pointed out his poor efforts, he blamed other people. In fact, it sounded like he spent the entire time saying, “You are going to give me a 10, aren’t you? It was never my fault things went wrong. You need to give me a 10.”

She was told that if she gave the salesperson and the dealer a 10 on the survey they would give her a free oil change.

The salesperson said that if she wasn’t going to give him a 10 it would probably be best if she didn’t do the survey at all.

She had to endure a bunch of whining about just how hard his life is and why she really needed to give him a 10.

He was so obsessed with getting a 10 that she hesitates to give less out of a mild concern of some type of retribution.

The whole thing sounded boring, repetitive, insulting, and possibly immoral. If you want a 10, do 10 work. If you can’t do 10 work and your career hinges on it, find another career.

I wonder if the company knows how much their dealers and salespeople are aggressively gaming the system? Punishing for anything less than a 10 seems counterproductive because if forces people to be short-sighted and silly and ultimately creates an experience that discourages repeat sales. People make mistakes, things go wrong, customers can be unreasonable, some people will never give a top rating except at gunpoint, etc. Insisting on continuous very, very high performance is fine, but it places much greater emphasis on outstanding hiring and very thorough training.

A top performer will still stand out and rise above when things go bad and try to make it right because they are focused on delivering a great experience, regardless of the circumstances. Marginal performers will retreat into fear and self-preservation. Their well-meaning system forces these extremes.

How would you set it up differently if you were the parent company?

people will talk

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: people are talking about you.

Managers: at night, around the dinner table, your employees are telling their families all about you. They are talking about their day and your part in it; how you’ve affected their lives, the things you’ve done, what they think about you.

Employees: at night, around the dinner table, your manager is telling their family all about you. They are talking about their day and your part in it; how you’ve affected their lives, the things you’ve done, what they think about you.

Everyone: at night, around the dinner table, your co-workers and your customers are telling their family all about you. They are talking about their day and your part in it; how you’ve affected their lives, the things you’ve done, what they think about you.

No matter what level you are in the organization, no matter whether you serve internal or external customers,  the people above you, below you, and alongside you are talking about you. You can’t stop them from talking about you, it’s just the way things are. But if they are going to talk, what do you want them to say about you? How do you want them to describe you?

Be that person. Be someone worth saying great things about. Be the co-worker, employee, and leader that inspires and develops and makes a difference in the lives of all those around you.

creating HR value

Creating value is about making things simpler, easier, better, quicker, or more effective for the customer. If it’s not solving our customer’s problems – and solving them better than the other options – it’s time to seriously re-evaluate why we’re doing it. Unfortunately, bad HR doesn’t get that: 1) HR has customers; and 2) it’s all about customer service.

[I originally wrote this in response to a great blog post by Tim Sackett but it stands alone pretty well.]

keep it simple, make it easy

Want to know a secret of great businesses, of great customer service, of just getting stuff done? If you want someone to do something, make it as easy as possible for them to do it.

The best example is Amazon and their 1-click checkout. It doesn’t get any easier to give a business my money. Although it sounds intuitive, there are tons of examples of businesses that do the opposite. For example, I used to live near a dry cleaner that didn’t take debit cards (?!?). They never understood that forcing me to go to an ATM before getting my cleaning pretty much ensured I used a different cleaner.

There are many examples that are much, much subtler. This is on my mind because just this week alone, I was assaulted with several examples of people wanting something from me but making it very difficult to do:

  • A company I’m a certified trainer for emailed to let me know that revised materials were now available on their website. But no mention of where. It took me a good five minutes to track them down when a hyperlink in the email would have taken them no more effort and would made it a snap for me to find (and use) the new materials.
  • A friend forwarded a newsletter on training and l liked it enough to go to the website to subscribe. Unfortunately, they REQUIRE me to give name, company, address, email, phone number, some demographic info about the company, etc. I just wanted a newsletter, not a relationship. If they had only asked for an email I would have subscribed then they could have wowed me into buying their products. Instead, they made it easier for them to do a sales call to me, but made it harder for me so now they won’t get the chance.
  • I received an email that wanted me to provide some information and then told me where I could find the address to send it rather than just providing the address. What? The odds of me replying went down substantially.
  • I’m attending a training in the fall and was sent a reminder that “to sign up if I hadn’t already”. There are – maybe – 30 people eligible for the training and they couldn’t look at the roster and send out the reminder to only those who still need to sign up? Instead I received an email that I didn’t need to get UNLESS I haven’t signed up yet and only thought I did so now I have to email them just to confirm.

That was all just this week. Great customer service – great leadership – means finding ways to remove barriers to action – not adding them.

keepin’ it relevant

Recently my daughter and some friends were doing a scavenger hunt where they followed a series of clues to discover the prize at the end. One of the clues was, “The place where we get bills.” Immediately, my daughter rushed to the computer because that’s where we pay bills. Uh oh. The last thing a business wants is to be irrelevant to the customer.

Your business, your department, and even you become irrelevant to your customers the second they no longer think of you as a resource and solution to their problems. Few think about it that way, but it’s true. Customers are trying to solve a problem they have and need you to do it. Put another way, from the customer’s point of view, your business (department, team, etc.) is useful and relevant only if you can solve their problem.

Banks exist to solve the problems of safely storing and accessing money. Lawnmowers exist to solve the problem of an unkempt lawn. Car dealers exist to solve personal transportation problems. Human Resources departments exist to solve the problems of finding, hiring, managing, and developing people. And so on. Internal or external, it doesn’t matter – your job is to help your customers solve their problems.

When salespeople don’t listen to the customer, they don’t (can’t!) provide solutions. When employees judge their worth to the company by their tenure rather than the problems they are solving, they are missing the point. When HR departments focus on administration they are solving only the lowest level of problems (which are easily outsourced). When your potential customers avoid you or work around you or tolerate you because you are the only option (for now), you become a problem to them.

You become a problem that they will look to someone else to solve.