I’ve been doing a lot of shopping at Lowe’s and Home Depot recently, and I’ve noticed an interesting behavioral shift in the employees at these stores.  I’m very seldom asked if I need help finding something.  (Face it, after the fourth offer it starts to get annoying.) Instead they greet me with a simple, “How are you today?”  Now this, this doesn’t get annoying.  Quite the opposite, it makes me feel welcome in the store.  It also opens the door for me to ask for help should I need it, leaving me in control rather than putting me on the spot.

This is a perfect zero-cost improvement in customer service.

I served on a quality control committee at one of my employers.  In the QC meetings the various department heads would report on how many mistakes were made in their areas, the impact of those mistakes, and what was being done to prevent the mistakes from recurring.

Except that they refused to use the word ‘mistake.’  Instead they used the word ‘variance,’ even when speaking with each other informally.

‘Variance’ completely eliminates any sense of urgency when it comes to resolving problems.  It sounds great if you want to make a good impression when talking to someone outside your company, but removing urgency is the last thing you want internally when it comes to solving problems.

1 – Make sure your customer can find your contact information very easily.  Place it prominently on your website and in your email signature.

2 – Exchange contact information, especially telephone numbers, with a customer when making an appointment with them.

3 – Where possible, give them a direct phone number or telephone extension instead of a main number where they might have to wait on hold, even if the direct number is not toll-free.

4 – If you’re going to be late to an appointment, let them know BEFORE the scheduled time.  Call if it’s an in-person appointment, email if you can’t make the conference call, etc.

5 – If you have a customer on hold update them every five minutes, even it’s just to say you’re still waiting for an answer.  Through email, update them at least once every business day.

6 – For telephone queues, the automated attendant should inform your customers how long the projected hold time will be.  This should be updated at least every three minutes.

Proactive communication is the single most important aspect of any relationship you will ever have, and nearly all of these techniques can be implemented at essentially zero cost.  Always be on the lookout for situations where a customer is left on hold, figuratively speaking, and use some proactive communication to get them off hold.

If you’re running late for an appointment with a customer, the onus is on you to get that information to your customer.  If you show up late with no notice – or, even worse, they call and ask where you are – you’ve set a negative tone for future relations, even if the appointment goes well.  For every future appointment, assuming you didn’t lose the customer, they’ll be thinking to themselves, “I wonder if they’ll show up on time this time.”

You can easily avoid this negative bias by calling your customer.  And next time, don’t be late.

I drove by a small automotive repair shop recently.  Outside the shop was a large marquee sign board of the kind you see in front of gas stations and such. The sign simply read, “OBDII HERE.”

Some quick background on the term OBDII: “OBD” stands for OnBoard Diagnostics – a vehicle’s engine computer monitors various functions related to the engine and pollution controls.  The “II” (that’s the Roman numeral two) refers to the second generation of OBD.

OBDII has been with us since 1996. Wouldn’t you be astonished to find a shop that didn’t work on 1996 or newer vehicles? The repair shop could use their marquee sign to tell us something remarkable – a current special they’re running, or perhaps that they’re experts in Mazda Miatas – but instead they’re using it to tell us something that doesn’t help us at all.

In a word: Access.  Your customers will often tell their friends about a problem they’re having with your company, increasingly using tools like use Twitter and Facebook, while never bothering to communicate with your company directly.  Tapping into Twitter and Facebook, as well as all the other social media applications, gives you the kind of access to your customers you’ve never had before.

Right now, your customers can contact you via telephone and email.  The nature of reactive customer service is that you generally only hear from your customers if there’s a problem.  Social media lets you turn that on its head.

Example: You work for Ford.  You’re searching Twitter for instances of the word ‘Ford’ and you see a tweet: "Ford sucks! They denied my warranty claim!"  You can send that person a reply on Twitter offering to help.

Or you work for a cell phone company and you’re experiencing an outage.  A little proactive communication here will go a long way toward reducing calls, emails, and customer complaints.  Post a quick update to Twitter and your Facebook page: "We’re investigating a tower outage in Nashville, TN. Updates as we get them." Then, obviously, keep people updated.

By doing so you’ve proactively (there’s that word again) told your customers you’re aware of the problem and are working on it.  You can’t easily do that with email, and you definitely can’t do it with the telephone.

You can also use social media for quick and easy promotions. A restaurant could post this: "Today only, $5 off any dinner bill of $30 or more."  You could put together an entire campaign for essentially zero advertising costs.

Use it to thank customers. Let’s say you see a tweet: "I love my new Blackberry. Thanks Verizon!"  If you work for Verizon you could can thank the customer and tell them you’re pleased that they’re happy.  Then send them a link to some free Blackberry apps on your website.  (It should go without saying that the apps will be very good ones.)  You’ve just created a positive customer experience in real-time that your customers will very likely tell their friends about.  You definitely can’t do that with the phone or email.

The possibilities are endless.  Having said that, however, it’s important to understand that your use of social media needs to be genuine and personal.  You must interact with people and not merely use social media as a one-way conduit to promote your brand.  That game doesn’t work in social media circles.  You must, simply must, be open and honest for your efforts to be successful.  If yours is a company that likes to hide behind barriers and make your customers jump through hoops to get problems resolved, your efforts will fail.  Customers see through these attitudes in a heartbeat.

I’ve been using the popular term ’social media’ in this post, but I prefer to think of it as ‘personal media.’  Everyone who uses Facebook, Twitter, and all of the other social media tools, have complete control over what they see in their feeds.  It’s up to them, not you.  You’re welcome to join in, but realized that you’re playing this game by their rules.  This is nothing to be afraid of, just be aware of it.

Face it, your customers are having conversations about you.  The easiest way to influence these conversations is by joining them.

One last thing to consider:  There’s a very good chance many of your employees already use various social media tools.  This is increasingly going to be the case over the next few years.  That’s an incredible pool of social media expertise – expertise that didn’t cost your company a dime to foster – just waiting to be tapped.

You’re working with a customer.  Perhaps there’s a problem that needs to be resolved.  Maybe you work at a bank, handling the mortgage paperwork for someone.  The specific situation isn’t that important.  There will likely come a time when you have to have to say to the customer, “Let me get back to you.”

Make a commitment to your customer right then and there on a date and time you’ll follow up.  And this is the critical thing – actually do it. Even if you have nothing more to report, call them. Lack of communication, especially when a specific time has been agreed to, says to your customer, “I don’t really care, and I’m not sorry, either.”

Photo courtesy totalAldo

I’m reading Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book Crush It! Why Now is the Time to Cash in On Your Passion.  I’m really enjoying it so far.  One section from the twelfth chapter, Shape Your Story, particularly jumped out at me.  Gary has kindly given me permission to quote it here:

“Every employee of every company should have a Facebook account where they can talk about their work and the company (in addition to whatever else they want). Let  people gripe, let them air their frustrations. Don’t wait for exit interviews to find out what your staff really thinks; tap into the pulse of the company and start making changes right away. Yes, there are websites dedicated to allowing  people to air their dirty laundry, but  people should be allowed to hang their dirty laundry on their own clothesline.  Empowering your employees to communicate is a great thing. If you suppress their urge to talk, you’re only weakening your brand from within by limiting your access to information.

When you know what people are saying and thinking about your brand, you can address it. If you see falsehood, you can correct it. If you see praise, you can show appreciation. If you see confusion, you can inform.”

Wouldn’t this level of transparency just be… astonishing?  Imagine a work environment where this level of communication is actively encouraged.  Such an environment would eliminate places for Yes Men, bullies, and slackers to hide, enforce accountability, and foster the sharing of new ideas.

Would your customers be scared away if you let them see the inner workings of your company like this?  Hint: They shouldn’t be.

 

 What Are You Hiding? [1:51m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I stumbled across an auction website the other day that I’d never seen before. Near the top of the site was a graphic that contained the following sentence:

“Online auctions of your favorite products for less than retail price.”

I had to shake my head after I read that. Why? The sentence serves no purpose.  All it does is point out the obvious. What else should a customer expect from an auction site? Paying more than retail price?

If you work in a bookstore and you see that a stack of books has fallen over, you’re going to do the obvious thing and restack the books. You’re not going to tap a customer on the shoulder, point at the stack of books and then say to the customer, “I’m going to restack that pile of books.” You’re just going to do it.

If you’re working a cash register at Target and a customer walks up with a cart full of items, you’re not going to say to the customer, “I’m going to ring up your purchase for you.” You’re just going to do it.

Pointing out the obvious is a complete waste of time for your customers, a waste of time for your employees, and a waste of money for your company.  A better idea: Take the time to say something great – something interesting, amazing, substantive, or remarkable.  Put some thought into it. Gather ideas inside and outside your company.  You can think of something great to say about your company, right?

PowerPoint has been around forever it seems. Is the de facto tool used for presentations of every variety. However, that is not to say that PowerPoint is always used effectively. I doubt there’s a single person reading this post that hasn’t sat through a handful of truly horrible PowerPoint presentations.  Bad presentations seem to have one thing in common – a presenter that does little but read the text on the slides.

If this is your style of presentation, allow me to let you in on a secret: No one likes those particular presentations. We all know how to read, and we can all read faster than you can speak. If all you’re doing is reading the text on slide after slide, you are wasting peoples time.

PowerPoint is best used to present talking points for a discussion, to provide a guide for the presenter and the audience on the subject being discussed. People want to hear what you know about the subject. If you don’t know anything more about the subject than what appears in the text on the slides, your presence is not necessary.

Citibank, for reasons unknown publicly, closed number of gas station credit cards on Wednesday of last week.  They mailed notices out on Monday, two days beforehand. Citibank customers trying to use those cards obviously had them declined, at least one of them italic she had already filled her gas tank. This person obviously had to pay for her gas using some other method.

It is inexcusable that Citibank mailed notices out only two days beforehand. With only two days notice, it is inconceivable that all of these notices would have arrived in time. They surely must have known that this was going to inconvenience a great many people, yet they did it anyway.

Let’s give Citibank the benefit of the doubt and say they had a legitimate reason for closing these accounts. We’ve heard too many stories in the news about credit card companies closing accounts on consumers that were in good standing to think this wouldn’t tarnish Citi’s reputation.  Giving their customers two weeks notice before termination of the accounts, rather than two days, would’ve gone a long way toward preventing this.

You know what else is inconceivable? That Citibank did not think all of this through beforehand. They knew this was going to negatively impact their customers. They knew this would negatively impact their reputation. Yet they went ahead with it anyway. I have to wonder if this is the best way of serving Citibank’s shareholders. In light of this, however, it does not surprise me that Citibank is in trouble. Would you open an account with Citibank right now? I know I wouldn’t.

Here’s a link to the story on MSNBC.com: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33388210/ns/business-consumer_news/

Image courtesy phantom kitty

If a customer needs to contact you, what options do you provide for them to do so?  Does your website have an easy to find phone number and email address?  Do you even have a website?  Do you have a brick and mortar location that customers can visit?  Is your IVR system easy to use, or does it frustrate your customers?  Do you bother answering the phone?  Do you give customers the option of leaving a voice mail instead of staying on hold?  Do you include contact information with every email that goes out?

Never, ever put up barriers to communication.  If you find one, tear it down.  Hiding from customers only encourages them to take their business elsewhere.

Image courtesy Pixel Packing Mama

It has become the norm for companies to include some variant of this line in outgoing emails: “Do not reply to this message.  This email address is not monitored.”

I know why companies do this.  One, it’s one less email address for them to monitor for spam.  Two, someone sold them on the idea that one-way communication with customers serves some positive purpose.

Here’s the problem: The very phrase ‘Do Not Reply’ is a barrier to communication.  Your customers should be encouraged to contact you, not prevented from doing so.

What sort of emails do companies send to their customers?  Confirmations of various kinds – orders being placed, use of a contact form, etc.  Opt-in newsletters.  Mostly good things, certainly.

But what about feedback?  What if a customer notices a problem with their order? What if they have a suggestion for your newsletter?  Even if you include in those emails some other way for your customers to contact you – a different email address, a phone number, etc – you’ve already told them you don’t want to hear from them.

Feedback is valuable because it’s a direct way of customers letting you know how you can serve them better.  That’s a gold mine of information.  If you throw up a barrier to feedback, how can you ever expect to serve your customers better?

A better approach: Set the ‘Reply To’ address on those particular emails to something that you do monitor, then get rid of the ‘Do Not Reply’ line entirely.

Nearly three weeks ago I received an email from a recruiter about a contract IT position here in Greensboro.  I’m already working with another agency on this contract, and it’s incredibly bad form to work through multiple agencies on the same position.  In fact, doing so will almost always disqualify you from consideration.  I replied to her email, explained things, and said I’d have to pass on this opportunity.

On Monday of this week I received a phone call from another person at the same agency about the same position. As I was listening to the voice mail this second person left me, I received an email from him.  Not a minute later I received another email from third person at this same agency about – you guessed it – the same position.

This might just be how they operate. That, or their internal communications need to be completely overhauled.  Either way, I wonder how many man-hours (and thus labor dollars) this duplication of labor is wasting.

How would you feel if this was happening at your company?