Today’s markets are dominated and driven by commoditization. Every consumer knows that an insurance policy is an insurance policy; a mortgage is a mortgage; a bank service is a bank service; and every product and service is pretty much the same as every other like product and service.
Although differentiation remains the primary force behind marketing and sales, you no longer can differentiate yourself with your products and services. Instead, differentiation between brands comes primarily out of the customer experience. How you treat customers and how they experience your products and services determine market share and profitability. Everything you say and do determine a customer’s experience, your brand image, and both your top and bottom lines. So why do we continue to have crappy customer experiences?
Yesterday, I spent 45 minutes trapped in T Mobile customer hell. Most of that time was spent repeating the phone tree trap over and over again. When I did manage to get a human being, I had to repeat my cell phone number, wait for them to look up my customer account and then I was forced answer the same questions asked by the previous customer care representative. Only to be told that my problem could not be handled over the telephone. I don't understand. What is so difficult about replacing a three-month old phone that no longer functions properly? Why do I have to take it to a T Mobile store 30 minutes away to have them verify that it isn't working? The solution is simple: Send me a new phone, require that I return the non-functioning one, and everybody is happy.
Why Customer Service Sucks
I believe customer service sucks because of leadership from the top and a department head who is either afraid to challenge that leadership or is so under-budgeted that he or she cannot fix the problem. Those are excuses for poor customer service and need not be tolerated. It is the responsibility of every department head to fight ignorance above at every turn and to educate to eliminate that ignorance. Doing so in an appropriate and research-backed way will deliver both authority and money. If it doesn't, then the business is lost and will never maximize its potential.Fixing customer service is a must. Like all business solutions, we begin by asking the right questions.
The first question a Call Center or Customer Service Vice President should ask him or herself is: What is my department's primary objective? The only correct answer is "to create happy and loyal customers who will continue to purchase their wants and needs from us." The second Question is: How do we create great customer experiences? The answers will vary from business to business, as creating great customer experiences depends on who your customers are and what they most want from you. However, every business needs to focus on the basics to ensure happy customers.
Basic Guidelines for Creating Great Customer Experiences
- Know your customers. Why have they chosen to shop with you over your competitors? What do they most want to experience when they interact with you?
- Simplify your phone trees. No customer should experience a phone tree more than once per call and the only options should be which human the customer wants to talk to--sales, customer service, technical assistance. That's it.
- No one sits on hold for longer than 60 seconds, no matter your crisis. Hire enough staff to cover any emergency. Forward incoming calls to a home phone or a cell phone of a staff member by creating emergency staffing. You will deliver return on your investment because a great customer experience is the only way to differentiate yourself and to create loyal and profitable customers.
- Train your customer service staff monthly. Frequently remind them that their only goal is to make customers happy. Give them the authority to say "yes." It is better to fix a "yes" mistake than to lose a good customer because of a "no" mistake.
- Build an Inbound Marketing system that gathers data from every customer touchpoint, analyzes the data, and then predicts customers' wants and needs. When a customer calls, the customer service representative should see that data in real time based on the phone number collected during the phone tree phase above. Then, not only should they be able to provide a solution for the caller but using the real-time data the customer service representative should be able to up-sell or cross-sell based on the analysis and predictive function of the Inbound Marketing software. Not only do you create a great customer experience; you also create a Customer Service Revenue Center.
- Constantly look for areas of improvement and implement the strategies and tactics to get better at providing service customers' wants and needs and by exceeding their expecations.
The Bottom Line
Spending money to create great customer experiences delivers more ROI than any other thing a business can do. It's a simple equation--happy customers = greater profits over a longer-period of time.
