I had a great conversation with a really smart guy from San Francisco last week that I hope to make a colleague for a project. And why? Because “he got it.”
Here’s the crux. Customers don’t care about your hierarchies. It’s all one thing to them.
They don’t care you need to go to your boss for approval, they don’t want to wait for you to find the “right salesperson for your region (I was shared a story where a prospective customer sat on the line, credit card ready to drop thousands of dollars with this software vendor, and they were made to wait 20 minutes for the “right regional sales rep.”
If you want to look under the hood (to use a Detroit analogy) and figure out what makes companies like Zappos and Mosso tick and turn over their industries – it’s their killer customer service.
Make sure your website is customer friendly and not confusing for contacting your organization; and at the very least, externally, all major companies (or those companies with designs on growing their business) need to at least have basic online and social media presences aimed at customer service, and then follow through with it by answering questions and resolving issues.
Welcome to the future, which is now. There are no territories; customer service needs to be a seamless situation. The sooner your company becomes flat when it comes to treating the people who keep the lights on, the longer your lights are going to stay on. And maybe, it means you take a risk and charge an appropriate amount to cover that service cost.
Because if your customer experience stinks, it doesn’t matter how much marketing voodoo you do; you may get a short burst but few long-term effects.
Totally agree. Front line employees should never confuse their knowledge of internal organization (“that’s how we work internally”) with their dealing with customers (“this is how we explain to our customers”).
Another thing is – please don’t involve customers in the operation of your database. They do not care what “the computer says”; they just need their questions answered and complaints resolved.
It boils down to two things, in my opinion
1. Training.
2. Empowering the staff so they are there to serve, not to just carry out a job.
Evelyn