good customer service won’t get you anywhere…

… being a company that genuinely cares will!

i went to dinner the other night and received some really bad customer service (infact i’m sure she secretly spat in my dinner, but that’s a whole other story!). anyway, as i left the restaurant i mentioned it to the manager and he casually apologised but somehow it wasn’t enough. i knew that i wouldn’t be going back there again and it got me to thinking…. i am the first to admit, that this is probably a bit of a tangent, but nonetheless!

smiles

gone are the days where a smiley face at the customer service desk or at the end of a phone are sufficient. customer expectations are higher than ever and rightly so, with ever growing competition in the marketplace. nowadays, your whole company has to be genuinely smiley, from inside out.

whilst this can be scary for many companies to accept, you have to open up, to be receptive to criticism, pro-active with improvements and not afraid to admit you might have some flaws – people will love you more for it.

cool kid culture

so many companies love the idea of “social media”, they want to be seen as one of the “cool kids” leading the way. however (and this is a big however!), unless the culture of your company is adapted to embrace such a change, you may as well be banging your head against a brick wall.

if you’re going to embrace new technologies and communication tools, you’re going to also need to embrace the way that you use them (and… wait for it… even change your processes!! yuck i hate the word ‘process’). for example, if a blog post has to be passed through ten levels of sign-off, it’s no longer genuine and loses it’s meaning. i know how scary that can be for many companies, but it’s true.

wanting to build a community around your product or service is great, but as soon as you’re doing it purely to monetise, all of your hard work is undone and you’re back on that scrap heap again – those good old internets folks will sniff it out a mile off.

trust your team

be okay with the fact that you’ll have to empower your team to become brand ambassadors. no, they probably won’t be a part of the team forever, but that’s life, it happens. one thing that IS guaranteed, is that they’ll be a hundred times more committed and dedicated to helping you succeed whilst they’re there. if you worry the whole time that you don’t want to give them too much power, you’ll end up having someone for a few years giving maybe 80% – unleash their full potential.

open the floor

it’s natural to want to maintain control, no one doubts that. however, by realising the huge opportunity presented to you by opening up the floor to your users/consumers you’ll be putting yourself way ahead of your competitors. the honest feedback that you’ll receive will give you the information you need to adapt your offering to precisely match the demand of the market. this is raw data that companies with a more traditional approach would pay a fortune for. take advantage of that.

the tools are there for you, use them!

the first thing that i would recommend for any company is to set up an account with get satisfaction. i personally believe that this is the future of customer service. tons of companies are now using this service to support customers, exchange ideas, and get feedback about their products and services. the thing that i love about get satisfaction is that anyone with an opinion or some information to give can contribute to the conversation, plus it’s free!

monitor feedback using tools like summize, tweetscan or google alerts. this allows you to respond immediately to someone who wasn’t 100% satisfied rather than waiting to be contacted by someone who was really displeased. without a shadow of a doubt, they’ll tell your friends about you and what better advocate than your users?

i recently had some difficulties whilst using campaign monitor. i made a flippant comment on twitter to say that i was struggling and before you know it, there’s a response for me asking if i need help. it’s that kind of service that makes me choose them above other email clients and that’s the kind of care and attention that i want from all companies that i interact with.

rambling

i know that you’ll probably think that a lot of what i’ve rambled on about above only applies to web companies, after all, it’s mainly tech-savvy people that use sites like twitter etc. i’d agree with you, this isn’t mainstream practice for companies at the moment. but that in itself is a huge opportunity – it’s a chance to put yourself ahead of the rest and be really good at customer service when mass adoption does take place rather than playing catch-up.

don’t settle for being okay, go be damn fabulous and people will thank you for it.