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Customer Service: Looking After Customers
The old myths about customer service just aren’t true.
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Customer Service: Myths
If you want to keep your customers happy and loyal, let go of old ideas about customer service.
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Customer Service on a Personal Level
A customer-centric culture has easily identifiable hallmarks, and your employees should know what they are.
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Create a Customer-Centric Culture
Creating lifetime customers is a smart strategy for to reduce marketing costs and improve profitability.
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Customer Service: It Starts with You
Customer service is a culture that begins with each individual employee.
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Customer Service: Culture is the Fabric
Your company culture is the biggest influence on how you treat customers.
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Build Partnerships for the Future
Customer focus means building relationships for the long term, not for short-term gain. Lose the battle to win the war. Offer new solutions, like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs. Build relationships up to the C-level. Customer service means customer service plus one.
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Loyalty in the Digital Age
Despite the fact that technology enhances our ability to conduct business, the struggle to build loyalty is greater than ever. To understand why, we have to look at human evolution.
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Eliminate Loyalty Blind Spots to Improve Performance
What impression do your words and actions convey? If you don't know, you could be unwittingly driving away employees and customers.
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The Scale of Progress
The scale of progress has turned business from long-standing, face-to-face relationships to cost-conscious transactions that are void of the human touch and bad for the bottom line.
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Radical Customer-Centricity
Customers vary in their individual wants, needs, and profitability to the company.
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The Customer is King
To delight customers first understand and align with them.
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Customer Service is an Ongoing Relationship
Companies like Harley-Davidson, Zappos, Running Room, Uber, and Apple offer several ways to access customer service. They don’t use scripts, but empower customer reps to make decisions and surprise and delight customers. Sarah Robinson gives examples.
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Pay Attention to Your Customers
All businesses are, or should be, customer-driven. But, as John Foster explains, being customer-driven goes beyond simply meeting customers’ needs.
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Customer Focus Increases Profits
Businesses all want a great bottom line: profits. But, as Vishen Lakhiani reports, focusing on profits is not the best way to either increase the profits or run a business.
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Why Will Some Customers Leave?
Call a customer you lost, find the real reasons, and fix them. Then tell that customer you fixed the problem and earn their business back.
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Reducing Customer Risk
To protect against changes in customer preferences use a continuous, proprietary, detailed customer feedback system.
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Customer Engagement and Growth
Customers who are fully engaged recommend the product or service to others, who also engage.
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Satisfying Customers
Putting customer needs at the heart of your business is key. BAA's former CEO suggests ways to motivate staff by improving your customer feedback.
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Setting Expectations Is A Key Skill
Aart de Geus discusses the delicate balance between setting expectations high enough but not too high. The key is in listening to what the customer needs, meeting or exceeding reasonable expectations, and being clear about goals that cannot be actualized.
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Customers Give You Feedback Everyday
Sometimes the basics are easy to overlook. In this example, William Lamar shares his experience at McDonald's and how listening to customer feedback resulted in a better cup of coffee.
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Creating Legendary Customer Experiences
Nigel Barlow offers suggestions for creating legendary customer experiences.
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Customer Satisfaction, Who Cares?
Give customers an experience that makes them say "Wow!"
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Myths of Customer Service
“The customer is always right” is a myth. But the customer is always the customer. What customers want most is to be listened to. “No news is good news” is also a myth. Make sure that you get feedback from customers at every phase of delivery.
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Keep the Customer in the Room
When Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, has a meeting there is always an empty chair in the room, representing the customer. If the meeting is about operations, what would the customer think? Pricing? Marketing? Take the customer’s perspective in all cases.
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Leaders Listen to Customers
Leading an organization requires attention to the day-to-day minutia of the business and an understanding of the connection between the business and its employees and customers.
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How to Enchant Customers
Trustworthiness, likability, and quality enchant customers.
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Customers for Life
Brian Tracy explains that customer satisfaction is the true measure of success in business.
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Art of Satisfying Customers
Jason Jennings provides some surprising research regarding customer behavior.
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Disgruntled Workers Don’t Give Great Customer Service
Every company wants to deliver great customer service, but usually doesn’t. Great customer service has more to do with the employee than the customer. Your job as a manager is to identify obstacles and remove them. A great way to do that is to ask.
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Mass Customization and Commercial Applications
If every customer is different, how do you customize? Big box retailers like Sears are in trouble. Now it’s Wal-Mart at the low end, high-end luxury retailers, and niche chain retailers. Chip Conley describes how Joie de Vivre, his boutique hotel chain, fills a niche.
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Engage Your Customers To Grow Your Business
It's important to know the difference between talking with your customers and talking at them. Dan Wittner highlights how engaging customers grows a business.
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Use Customer Feedback To Set Priorities
Communicating with customers helps an organization set and prioritize goals, as Brian Malloy illustrates in this lesson about developing a customer-centric organization.
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Everybody Affects Customer Satisfaction
Tammy McLeod shares how a survey by an outside company served as a wake-up call for expanding the view of customer service.
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Use A Crisis To Build Community
Sometimes a negative experience can draw people together. Tammy McLeod reveals how you can use a crisis situation to unite a community and improve customer satisfaction.
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Let Customers Know You Are Listening
Jeb Dasteel explains why responding to customers, even with disappointing news, is preferable to withholding communication and may even be beneficial.
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Customer Focus in Formula One Racing
Everyone in the company who has touch points with customers is an ambassador for the brand, including truck drivers and people who work in finance or R&D. An employee told a major customer some stories about the company, not knowing who he was talking to.
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Introducing Stress in Call Center Training
Training is always helpful, but it’s so much more meaningful and effective, explains Rich Herbst, when you introduce stress in a variety of ways.
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The Use of Simulations in Call Center Training
Preparation is a key to success in any industry. And simulated training, says Rich Herbst, is invaluable in helping new employees prepare to interact with customers.
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Cultural Differences in Call Centers
Good customer service training is not a “one size fits all” proposition. Instead, as Rich Herbst shares, you need to fashion your training based on the personalities and characteristics of the people you are training.
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Building Confidence in New Call Center Employees
The cost of training customer service representatives can be high, because the industry has high attrition rates. Rich Herbst explains how to lower those attrition rates by building confidence in those being trained.
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Reducing Stress in Call Centers
It’s not easy bringing new customer service associates along and helping them to feel comfortable and competent in their job. But Rich Herbst knows an effective way of reducing the stress new associates feel and helping them be successful.
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Measuring the Effectiveness of Call Centers
We all know it’s important to measure the effectiveness of our employees and systems. Rich Herbst explains a revolution in the way call center effectiveness is measured--a revolution brought on, in part, by the advent of social media.
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Start with Creating Value Exchanges
Everything in life is a value exchange.
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Focus on the Right Data to Understand Customer Interest
There’s plenty of data, but the truth is there is only a small amount of information that is valuable to a marketer in driving a customer to a better purchase.
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Never Take a Customer for Granted
You can never take any customer for granted. As Campbell Jones shares, anytime you do so, you’re putting your business at risk.
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Customer Focus: Define Who They Are
Your first customer is you. If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing you will fail. Your second customer is your employees. They are the bridge between you and the end user.
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Retail is Entertainment
Retail is about entertainment; customers come in because they want to feel good. First, have the right product in the right store; inner city Detroit is different from Dallas. Then hire associates from the community, support them, and provide compelling stories.
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Customer Communities for Customer-Driven Innovation
Develop communities of customers to provide feedback, offer suggestions, and promote you to others.
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Getting Past Satisfaction to Loyalty
“Satisfaction” surveys of customers are a failure. Enterprise Rental offers a better model.
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Driving Growth with Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The program explains how to compute a Net Promoter Score and why it is important.
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Working Towards Custodial Pride
Stages in moving a relationship go from initial interaction and repeat confidence (1 & 2) to sustainment and capitalization (4 & 5). The third stage is custodial pride.
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The Bowtie and the Shoestring
Bowtie relations with a client have a single point of contact—a single point of failure. Shoestring contacts eliminate the single point of failure, build levels of relationships that illuminate different pieces of the puzzle, and help move relationships from creation to capitalization.
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External Focus: It's Your Customers and Not Your Competition
It’s important to reach out to your customer, listen to their needs in both good and bad times.
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Customer Focus
Software salespeople talked to customers about the software, not about how the software could help customers achieve their goals. To change the focus to customers a “customer value” life cycle management model was developed and used around the world.
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Resolving Conflicts with Customers and Partners
Use challenging situations in a relationship as opportunities.
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Choose Your Customers Carefully for Growth
Not every customer is a good customer. You can’t do everything for everyone. Focus on what you’re really good at.
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Great Sales Professionals Sustain the Relationship
It’s important to reward, recognize, reinforce, and validate the client’s decision to buy from you.
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Aligning Your Solution with Customer's Needs
Dat#3 established a “solutions framework” that uses a six-phase, project-based process.
