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Category: Customer Service

Watch What You Say

1:06 pm Saturday, April 18th, phone in my right hand listening to the ring tone. Calling a downtown restaurant known for good lunches in the sleepy city of Jackson where on a Saturday half of downtown shutters the doors before the sun hits it’s zenith. They answer…

“Hello, {Restaurant Name}”

“Hi, how late are you open?”

“One o’clock…” (big pause)

“Oh, you just closed?”

(Exasperated) “No, one o’clock AM!”

Geez, sorry for asking…

First impressions go a long way. Unfortunately many first impressions are made by wrong assumptions. The person on the other end of the line assumed that everyone knew they were open at night and therefore assumed that “one o’clock” could only mean “one am”.

Imagine if I had called at 12:30 pm. I might have assumed that “one o’clock” meant “in thirty minutes”. And they would have lost any chance at my business that night.

Simple little misunderstandings caused by assumptions that lead to lousy first impressions. If you want to make an assumption, assume that every caller is a first time caller to your business and knows little to nothing about you. How would you treat that caller differently?

Exactly! You’d give them more precise and useful information and avoid embarrassing and potentially costly misunderstandings.

Put a little time into your next staff training to evaluate faulty assumptions you might make when you answer the phone. Use this story to illustrate the point. It may be the least expensive best training you’ll use this year.

-Phil

PS Full disclosure: It was my mom who made the call. She almost hung up at hearing “one-o’clock”. Although she and her friends are going there tonight, her first impression will be a lasting one, and they’re going to have to work really hard to overcome one seemingly innocuous answer and win her over.

Flowers For My Lady

Another man gave flowers to my wife. Should I be angry? Jealous? Should I hunt him down? Threaten him?

I wanted to send him a thank you note.

The perp who gave my wife flowers runs the body shop across the street. Al Mackey of Mackey’s Body Shop. And no, he’s not a perp. He’s a smart businessman. He knows something about customer service.

Body shop work is not high on the list of things on which we want to spend our money. No one thinks to themselves, “Wow, maybe Thursday I’ll go body shop shopping.” Nope, a trip to the body shop means something or someone caused a dent or scratch in your car and you’ve got to shell out money to get it fixed or make a claim on your insurance which means you’ll still be paying for it over the next three years in higher premiums.

Al knows this. Al knows that no one is really happy to see him, especially when the bill is due. And he knows that a little kindness and a little TLC goes a long way in easing the pain. My wife handed him a check for $2350 and he handed her a bouquet of flowers. Guess what she was talking about all day?

For the price of a bouquet of flowers, a mere pittance in a $2000 plus transaction, Al bought my wife’s loyalty, or at least a huge chunk of word-of-mouth and positive feelings.

And for that I applaud him as a master of Customer Service and Marketing. He identified a way to win a customer’s heart in an uncomfortable transaction and earn some word-of-mouth advertising on the side.

Thanks Al! It’s a great lesson for every business. Make the most uncomfortable transactions pleasantly memorable. Do that and I can guarantee it will get people talking about you.

By the way, did anyone notice how Customer Service and Marketing are so closely linked? Me, too.

-Phil

Do You Have It In Stock?

Took the kids to Florida. The pool was heated. Parker brought his swim fins. Ian’s didn’t fit.

No problem, we’ll be in Florida on the ocean. We’ll have no trouble finding Ian a new pair. Right?

A couple of stores that we thought might have fins failed to produce. Plenty of goggles and masks, but no fins. That’s okay; we had an ace in the hole. A huge swimwear store was right up the road. We were sure they would have what we wanted.

Oops.

According to the kid behind the counter, swim fins weren’t due in for another week. “It wasn’t season,” he explained.

Being in the toy industry with both summer and winter items, I understand the concept of seasonal stock. I just don’t buy into it. If you want to buy a sled from me in July, I can sell you a sled. I may not have the biggest selection, but I will have a sled.

My son, however, doesn’t yet get this concept. Needless to say, he was heartbroken.

So ask yourself this… How many customers are you sending away heartbroken because you didn’t have something in stock during what you consider to be off-season?

Perception is reality, and although you may think it is off-season, you never know when a customer might believe it is in-season. Is there a corner of your store that doesn’t move much merchandise where you could put a small display of off-season stuff? Or a corner of your stock room?

Imagine Ian’s reaction if the kid at the counter said, “Hold on,” and ran into the stock room and produced a set of swim fins.

Heartbroken or Happy?

Which do you want your customers to be?

Phil

PS Six stores later we found some swim fins. SIX STORES LATER

What Are They Talking About?

When people talk about your business what are they saying? Do you know? More importantly, are people even talking about your business?

Have you given them something to talk about?

Roy H. Williams, aka Wizard of Ads, mentioned three ways at a recent conference to help you get WOM (word-of-mouth) from your customers.

First, you could choose to be over-the-top excellent in Design. Your store layout, merchandising, decorating, facade and mood could be so unique and outstanding that people talk about it for days and weeks afterward. Have you ever seen the Ferris Wheel at the Times Square Toys R Us? That’s over-the-top Design. Does your business have a cool and unique characteristic? Do you flaunt it? I saw a program on the Travel Channel of the 20 coolest public bathrooms. It was totally intriguing. My grandfather always had the idea of building a carousel on the front of the store with half the ride inside, half outside. Kids could get on the carousel and enter the store that way. Imagine what kind of WOM that would generate (and yes, I’m still considering it).

Second, you could choose to have over-the-top excellent Performance by your staff. I’m not talking about “excellent customer service”. Everyone says they have that. And, frankly, customers aren’t impressed by people who are just friendly & knowledgeable. They expect that. In fact, the only WOM you get from excellent customer service is when you don’t supply it. And that’s WOM you could do without.

What I’m talking about is a performance so rare that it’s exciting, extraordinary and unique. Customer service that is so over-the-top it becomes an experience. And it has to be an every day, all the time experience. If you’ve ever been to Pike’s Place Fish Market you know what I’m talking about – and what customers are talking about. The throwing of fish, the yelling, laughing, playing, the customer involvement. What can you do every day to make your customer’s experience more memorable?

The third, and most intriguing way Roy described was Generosity. What are you giving your customers to make them talk about you? A jeweler who replaces watch batteries for free, a restaurant who gives out free desserts to dinner guests, a hotel that has free curling irons, cell phone chargers, or web connections. Those are just some examples of generosity. But here’s the clincher. To get WOM from your generosity you have to do it, but not advertise it.

Imagine you go out to eat and see a sumptuous dessert menu on the table. You know you want one, but aren’t sure if you want to fork over the dough for an extra you don’t need. But then your waiter says, “How about a dessert tonight? It’s on me.” How could you resist? And won’t you be talking about that meal to your friends? Pretty soon, you’ll be saying, “Hey, let’s go to so-and-so’s. The last three times I was there the waiter gave us a free dessert.”

For the cost of some flour and sugar, a restaurant that does this could buy a lot of WOM, and a lot of loyalty. (And that flour & sugar could probably already be fixed into the cost of the meal.)

Word of Mouth is the best form of advertising – always has been, always will be. But you have to give someone something to talk about. Start looking at your Design, Performance and Generosity and see if you can find something worth a conversation. Then maximize it to the extreme and watch the talk begin.

-Phil

Three Mistakes to Avoid

Circuit City is just about gone. The remaining stores are liquidating as we speak. This once fabulous chain (one of the 11 companies featured in Jim Collins’ book Good to Great) made two of the three classic retail blunders so common in a rough economy.

First, they slashed prices. In December 2006, in an effort to gain “market share” (the usual wrong-thinking excuse) Circuit City cut prices on flat-panel TV’s so low, there was no way to recoup the lost profits. The result? The worst loss in their history – $16 million.

Price-slashing is a desperate move at best, and usually backfires. Why? Most businesses never do the math. They don’t calculate the extra costs involved in selling the many more pieces they have to sell to make up the lost margin. If you make $500 per TV sold and you cut the price by $250, you need to sell twice as many TV’s to make the same profit. How much extra staffing and advertising will it take to do that? And how realistic is it that you’ll sell that many? Chances are you’ll spend more trying to sell the extra units, and also fall well short of your goal of units sold. Net result? Huge losses.

But, you say, Wal-Mart does it. Really? If all Wal-Mart did was slash prices they’d have been long gone years ago. No, Wal-Mart revolutionized operational efficiency. They made it possible to be successful on smaller margins. The volume came later as they gobbled up competitors in their ruthless expansions.

Unfortunately, price-slashing seems to be the retail mantra du jour. Sears & K-Mart have entered the fray, with JC Penney’s close on their heels. How’s that working out for you guys?

The only price-slashing that works is marking down the dogs as discussed in the previous post. Unless your business strategy is to go after the highly unprofitable Transactional Customers, price-cutting is only a recipe for disaster.

The second blunder Circuit City did followed right on the heels of the first mistake. After realizing such huge losses, in 2007 Circuit City went on an expense-cutting spree. The first to go? The high-priced, experienced sales personnel – the front-line sales staff with knowledge and sales expertise. To save money, Circuit City fired all the highest paid sales associates and replaced them with lower-paid hourly workers. And as anyone could have predicted, customer service dropped just as quickly.

When you’re selling commodities, maybe this works. But when you’re selling technology that evolves faster than the average mind can keep up, experience counts for something. Knowledge and know-how are your ally.

Unfortunately for Circuit City, this loss of knowledge in the sales staff left them with only one tool to compete in the electronics market – price. And we all know how that worked out.

In tough times, when sales are slow, one of the biggest expenses is payroll. The temptation is to cut payroll to save money. But when cutting payroll means sacrificing customer service, you’re just cutting off the nose to spite the face.

When your goal is to be the expert your customers can trust, payroll is no longer an expense, it is an investment. Instead of cutting staff, teach them to service better, to connect stronger, to sell more. Help them become more profitable for your business. Treat them like an asset, like an investment, and leverage that asset to get you the best returns it can.

If you have to make cuts, trim the fat. Cut out the inexperienced, non-productive, non-performing staff. Just as you would drop the stocks that don’t perform in your portfolio, drop the staff that don’t perform. And don’t worry about what they make. There is a reason all those Circuit City employees were making so much – they knew more, they worked more, they sold more. And the same is probably true with your staff, the most productive members make the most (if not, they deserve a raise). Keep the productive ones, give ’em raises, and cut the non-productive staff.

Price-Slashing and Payroll Cutting, two big mistakes you can’t afford to make in this economy.

The third? Marketing. We’ll save that for next time.

-Phil

Customer Policies are for Customers

I’m sitting in the new North Terminal at Detroit Metro Airport. My AirTran flight has been delayed 8 hours because the plane taking me to Florida couldn’t leave Ohio.

Sitting in the breast pocket of my sport coat is a $10 gift certificate for food in the terminal, just enough to offset the $7.95 I paid for 24 hours of WiFi service.

Sure, the food voucher is nice. I’m not sure if the $25 travel voucher that came with it is very enticing to future flights. But the real question is this…

Are they really appeasing customers in a way that makes customers believe they care or is there something more or different they could do?

Because of the delay I’ve already made a number of itinerary changes including missing out on a planned dinner with friends. $10 worth of free food doesn’t replace 2 hours with friends I haven’t seen in months. And money for food was the least of my worries. I budgeted far more than that for tonight’s dinner.

As for me, I would rather have free WiFi than a food voucher. $7.95 for 24 hours feels like a ripoff. I might be the only one who feels this way, but from where I sit there are 6 laptops open nearby, none with one of those cellphone type attachments.

Sure, food is the easy option for the airline, so easy they have the forms pre-printed and stacked underneath the counter. But doing what the customer wants is always the best option.

Are your policies designed so that the customer gets what she wants? Do you even ask? Or do you have a rote response for everything so preplanned that you don’t even care what the customer thinks?

It’s something worth pondering.

I’ve got 6.5 more hours till takeoff, I think I’ll ponder a while:-)

-Phil