The absolute truth is a monthly newsletter published by Absolute Marketing Group to assist businesses in marketing their company effectively.

Customer Service is the Best Marketing Tool

By MacDalton Berns

Have you heard the following customer service adages during your career?

“Treat ‘em right and they’ll come back.”

“One satisfied customer will tell one person. One unhappy customer will tell 20 people.”

“Take care of ‘em or someone else will.”

It is no secret that leading companies have focused on “treating the customer right” for many years.

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” – Sam Walton

“Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.” – Walt Disney

“Every great business is built on friendship.” – J.C. Penny

An Advertising Age article reported that 83% of adults cited past experience with a brand as the most important factor in their purchase decisions. Quality and price ranked second and third (Johnson, 2006). To ensure a good experience, a business owner/manager must invest time and resources into improving their business’ customer service in four main areas of customer interaction: phone, face-to-face, intra-company and Web.

Phone Interaction

The person who answers the phone at a business is essential for customer service success. Ideally, the person must have a positive attitude and must make the caller feel like they are important no matter why they are calling (e.g. telemarketer, sales representative or wrong number). Every caller deserves respect. Every caller could be a customer or prospect.

Intra-company Interaction

Treating co-workers well translates into treating customers well. In an addictive manor a favorable work environment spreads to each employee or associate and creates a utopia of positive energy. This positive energy is then passed on to the customers through friendly and helpful attitudes. It also opens up the avenues of communication within your company. With the avenues open employees are more likely to ask questions, help each other and share knowledge.

Face-to-Face Interaction

The employees that have contact with the public must understand that they need to re-earn the customer’s trust and business every time. If the customer thinks their business is being taken for granted, they’ll make the switch…quickly. The competition is making it an easy decision to switch with introductory offers and a promise of a higher service level. The employee must have solid listening and communication skills to meet the needs of all types of customer personalities.

Web Interaction

The person who is tasked with getting back to Web-generated inquiries must be extremely efficient. On-line shoppers need information quickly and do not have the patience to wait. Don’t forget they sent the message on-line for a reason, whether for information on a product or service, interactive customers are expecting an on-line response in return, not a call to their cell phone, unless otherwise noted. The response must not only be fast, but concise as well. If not short and to the point the customer will lose interest and be forced to write another email or turn to a competitor for help. Remember, the most important items in web interaction are speed and the ability to solve the problem for the customer.

Improvements

There is a three-step process to improve customer service. It is good to have employee participation during each step to increase emotional buy-in, which in turn increases the success rate.

Step #1: Rate Your Current Customer Service

There are many methods to rate your customer service. Here are a few:

Surveys (telephone, on-site comment cards, on-line surveys and receipt surveys) give past and current customers easy access to surveys so that you can easily collect data.

Secret Shopper – send in friends or hire a company to obtain quantitative and qualitative feedback on how your employees are treating them.

Employee and Vendor Feedback – have all your employees and vendors ask their family, friends and co-workers about past experiences at your business.

Step #2: Develop an Improvement Plan

After analyzing your results from the rating step, set realistic qualitative and quantitative goals for improvements. Develop a strategy on how to reach the goals and then determine individual tactics to attack the problem areas.

Step #3: Implementation and Maintenance

After setting goals and communicating the goals to the appropriate employees, start implementing the new tactics. You’ll need to re-evaluate how you’re doing after a pre-determined amount of time and possibly make some adjustments. Your team must commit to a maintenance plan to continually rate and improve customer service.

You have probably heard the adage “you can’t make everyone happy.” I believe we should introduce a new saying… “You can’t make every customer happy but it sure is fun to try!” And don’t forget that it is twice as difficult to draw in new customers then to retain the ones you have. Good cultivation of customers through relationships is the key to retaining lifelong business.

References

Johnson, B. (2006, November 9). Consumers Cite Past Experience as the No. 1 Influencer When Buying. Advertising Age.

MacDalton Berns is a marketing advisor at Absolute Marketing Group of Moorhead. Feel free to contact Mac at 218.284.1111 or mac@absolutemg.com.

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