Archive for the 'service' Category

Carnivale of Customer Service

Published
by
Nick Rice
on August 8, 2006
in business, management and service
. 0 Comments

Maria Palma of “Customers Are Aways” invited me to be part of her Carnivale on customer service.

I believe that good customer service is pretty simple yet surprisingly difficult to execute. The very nature of service is putting someone else’s need ahead of your own. In today’s society, that is not something that comes natural to most. You truly have to want to help someone to succeed in customer service. It has to be part of your being.

Many moons ago, I started corporate American life in Tech Support. I was young and had never really worked with the general public before. In dealing with Tech Support calls, you really start off on a bad foot. Something is broken and it needs to be fixed - quickly and painlessly and there’s a good chance it’s out of warranty. On top of that, you’re just a faceless voice on the other end of the phone. It’s much easier to to go postal over the phone than it is when you’re sitting across the table. At that time, the company was very focused on keeping customers and prospective customers happy. Tech Support was the face of the company’s brand to 99% of the callers. We were instructed to be respectful, knowledgeable and empowered to do what we thought it would take to solve their problem. That’s all great. Unfortunately a lot of teams were also praised for taking as many calls as possible and not giving away free service (parts, service calls, etc…). Think about the recent fiasco with AOL - but it never close to that situation. Regardless there in lies the rub. Some Tech Supporters were naturally geared towards call volume instead of truly helping each caller. Luckily I stayed in a product group that was very hands on and always went above and beyond to help each user. And they loved it. I would get thank you letters, gift baskets, Christmas cards - you name it. And the beauty was that you never knew who was connected to the person on the other end of the phone. I ended up solving problems for the CEO of Caterpillar, IBM board members, and author Stephen King as he was trying to finish a short story. It was great and I learned a lot about helping people.

So here are the lessons I learned and currently live by:

  1. Treat everyone - everyone - with courtesy and respect
  2. Answer all voice mails and emails before you leave the office every night
  3. Never over-promise on something you cannot deliver (it’s much better to under-promise and over-deliver)
  4. Keep an eye on the little details - people notice
  5. Do what’s right for the customer - 99% of the people simply want to be treated fairly

We’re all consumers. We all have our own personal stories of bad service; they’re hard to forget.

Good customer service can overcome a lot of product issues. At the end of the day, just do what your Grandma told you years ago - treat others like you want to be treated. If everyone just did that, the customer service industry would be entirely different.

technorati tags > customer, service, strategy, support, carnivale, maria palma

The typical customer

Published
by
Nick Rice
on July 27, 2006
in business, management, service and strategy
. 0 Comments

I was reading this post from Olivier and I realized that he is describing how a large percentage of the American population consumes.

There are lessons to be learned.

  1. Most of time, consumers will tire of your products/services
  2. Comfortable and safe is only tolerable for so long
  3. The products that work today probably will not tomorrow
  4. Brand loyalty is hard to generate and harder to sustain
  5. Consumers are human, not statistics.
  6. Listening is better than analyzing.
  7. The “what have you done for me lately” attitude applies to products/services as much as people.

technorati tags > branding, consumers, customers, market research, trends, product development

Everything a marketer needs to know…

Published
by
Nick Rice
on July 14, 2006
in ROI, branding, business, entrepreneur, management, marketing, service and strategy
. 0 Comments

8.5×11 poster from Seth Godin

technorati tags > marketing, seth godin, poster, knowledge, customer, branding, advertising, marketer

Customer Service via Email

Published
by
Nick Rice
on April 6, 2006
in business and service
. 0 Comments

Found a good post via MicroPersuasion on how email responsiveness relates to customer service.

This is something that we’ve been discussing a lot during the last few days at Cre8tive Group. What do customers expect when judging service (which happens subconsciously a lot of times). How much of it is responsiveness versus doing what you said you would do or going above and beyond - and most importantly how does it affect their experience and loyalty.

Tough questions. We are re-discovering something we’ve always known. Not all customers are the right customers for our business. The customers that do not value process or documented expectations tend to think that we are pulling them through a knot hole. Other clients love it. They understand the power of the creative brief and know exactly what to expect from our efforts and interactions. We try to put a lot of thought into which design strategies will best meet our individual client’s business objectives. And that is communicated through every interaction we have with them over the long haul.

The point of all this is that email is a great way to stay in touch & transfer docs, but it’s a horrible way for us to build relationships or get new business (at least for us). If I’m not face-to-face or on the phone, I feel like I’m letting my customers down and I’m afraid that a nuance will be missed. I try to respond to every email & voicemail before I go to sleep. It’s tough but I’d like to think it’s a small way to keep my customers loyal - but you can’t neglect the other aspects like doing what you said you would, billing what you said you would, and treating them better than expected.