When I was the president of the local chamber of commerce, I thought it would be a wonderful idea to do workshops and seminars on customer service. After all, Key Largo, Fla., is a major tourist destination and the competition for dollars is fierce — not just with other tourist destinations, but within our community as well. Customer experience is a big part of any business, which is why some of them look to companies similar to Heap Analytics to help with improving their customer experience thus improving their customer service.
Guess how many businesses signed up? If you guessed ZERO, you would be right.
Why the lack of interest? Because every business owner and manager thinks he or she already has stellar customer service…so why bother? Can’t improve on perfection, right?
Wrong.
Customer service fails
Here are two of my own recent experiences.
I have a local company come by on a regular basis to take care of some minor household issues. The last time the technician arrived, he was here for less than five minutes (yes, I timed it) for a job that should have taken at least 15. And it didn’t take long after his departure to notice that in his rush, he failed to do the job properly.
So I called the office and explained the situation. The response I was looking for was “Oh my gosh! I am so sorry! Let me send him out there again, on us. I’ll make sure it never happens again. For good measure, I’ll beat him about the head and shoulders so he really gets the message.”
OK, I’m lying about that last part, but the response I got was lackluster at best, and filled with excuses at the worst: “Oh yeah. He just got back from vacation and I know he’s backed up, trying to get everything done. I’ll be sure to tell him.”
The second example: Waste haulers are notoriously hard on garbage cans. Workers bang them against the truck’s innards, then fling them, willy-nilly, into the yard — anyone’s yard, regardless of who owns them. I’ve had at least three wheeled cans ruined from rough handling when the wheels got knocked off. Without the wheels to provide stability, they don’t stay upright and there’s another 35 bucks down the drain.
But oh! How their actions change when a supervisor is driving around behind them. The cans are emptied gently and then set upright, just like they were when they were set by the road the night before.
Both points illustrate why companies fail at customer service. In the first example, the office personnel has not been trained — or worse yet, has adopted a “so what” attitude from the boss. In the second instance, too many bosses rely on what they themselves witness to judge how well their employees are doing.
Both are customer-service fails.
From my observation, not just as an executive but as a consumer, here is how to fail at customer service:
- Monkey see, monkey do. Just like with children who pick up bad habits from their friends or parents, employees pick up their attitudes about customer service from their bosses. Sometimes it’s how the boss handles customers face to face, but many times it’s how the boss complains after a run-in with an unhappy customer.
- Solution: If you disrepect your customers, so will your employees. You’re the boss; act like a grownup.
- Lack of training. Hey, these people aren’t rocket scientists, right? What the heck do front-line employees need to be trained about? And as a consequence, you get the receptionist who answers the phone in a flat monotone, “GoodmorningABCcompanyhowmayIhelpyou.” Or the clerk who says, “I don’t see anything wrong with this shirt. Why do you want your money back?”
- Solution: Set clear expectations of how your want your customers to be treated. Create a policy and a manual and train your people on how you want them to act. Refresh the training at least once a month.
- Power hoarding. The boss has to make every decision instead of empowering his or her employees to do what’s necessary to make the customer happy. The power hoarders at this point are clutching their chests, moaning, “I’ll go broke if I do this!” This is not just shortsighted, but untrue.
- Solution: Create a customer-service policy that sets the boundaries of what employees are allowed to do to handle a customer’s complaint. You should already have a refund policy in place, but you can add to that — offer a gift certificate of up to a certain amount or a free whozits or whatever else demonstrates to the customer that you actually care about his or her business.
- Relying on personal observation. And we all know how well that works, right? Isn’t every employee in the galaxy on his or her best behavior when the boss is around?
- Solution: Hire a mystery shopper. Give him or her a list of what you’d like your employers to be ranked on and let the shopper loose on your workers. Maybe it’s phone manners. Maybe it’s face-to-face interaction. Maybe it’s how your social media guru handles complaints on Facebook. Whatever — you set the standards, you’re nowhere to be seen and you can use the information in the customer-service training sessions mentioned earlier.
- Cheaping out. Are you hiring the best people possible for the job and paying them well enough to do it?
- Solution: It’s much less expensive to keep your existing customers than to get new ones. Depending on the industry, type of business, margins and so on, you can expect to spend 15% of your customer’s lifetime value on getting new people to buy. How about investing that money (or some of it) in hiring good staff — and keeping them? Don’t forget there is a cost associated with employee turnover, too; for top earners, it can be as much as 150% of their annual salary.
Every business will have critics. But in this Internet day and age, stories of bad customer service can be spread with the push of a button. And it can have a devastating impact on the bottom line. Make sure you are providing the best service to your customers and implement something like Gladly’s customer service platform in your business.
All that being said: What’s the best customer service experience you ever had? Let’s show companies how to improve customer service by giving them great examples. Please share in the comments section.