Annoyed by a lousy customer service agent early this morning, I’m more than motivated to share some thoughts on this subject. After all, I firmly believe customer service is one of best weapons available for small business owners.
An attention-grabbing article from Harvard’s Working Knowledge discusses about dominance trap, a condition wherein large companies are more inclined to neglect their customers. If you happen to be a small business owner like me, this is indeed an opportune situation to develop excellent customer service as your competitive advantage.
According to that article, there are 3 “Ds” essential in bringing “superior customer experience”:
1. Design the right offers and experiences for the right customers.
2. Deliver these propositions by focusing the entire company on them with an emphasis on cross-functional collaboration.
3. Develop their capabilities to please customers again and again—by such means as revamping the planning process, training people in how to create new customer propositions, and establishing direct accountability for the customer experience.
If you’re looking for some inspiration to augment your customer service, you can take a lesson from JetBlue’s founder David Neeleman and his role playing as flight attendant to gather consumer insights. Maybe adding the so-called HEARD (Hear, Empathize, Ask, Respond, and Deliver) technique might work for you as well.
But wait there’s more…watch and listen to the video below about the a cab driver’s passion to deliver customer satisfaction and how he turned misery to magic!
How’s this for customer service? Yesterday, I ordered two pizzas and a salad for delivery. Because it had been a while since I ordered from the chain, I repeatedely stated the price of each item out loud, as per the flyer I had on hand, and asked the CSR if each was correct. Each time, she didn’t respond, but after I persisted, she made a non-commital sound that I mistakenly took for confirmation.
When my order showed up, the delivery guy told me after I’d started punching in a tip that he was the owner. Usually, I don’t tip owners, especially because this place is so over-priced to begin with, but their pizza is delicious. Maybe I’m a jerk, but that’s that. But after he left and I finally found the receipt (which many drivers seem to want to hide from me), I found out I had been overcharged $4. Not a lot, but it’s the principle, since I also got taxed on the excess. So I called the same CSR and she conveniently seemed to have forgotten that I asked about the price of each item but remembered a few Seinfeld/Kramer jokes about do-it-yourself pizza. And yet, get this, yet she stated bluntly to me that the price of everything had gone up in the morning. So I guess customers don’t need to know this kind of information. What kind of customer service is that?
As someone that works out of the house and orders meals in a lot, I’m a bad food customer to peeve off. These idiots will be blogged about on my food blog, and I’ll be putting in a review of them on Google Maps. They’ve lost a customer who would have been semi-loyal. And, if I’m not mistaken, they violated the HEARD concept mentioned above.
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Here’s another bad customer service story, this time from Guy Kawasaki, about his experience with AT&T and trying to cancel a service he had never ordered in the first place. I regularly have problems like this with one of my web hosting providers:
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/06/my-iphone-revie.html