Going Going Gone!
I recently attended a lecture on marketing and I heard a statistic that as shocking as it was didn’t really surprise me. According to a recent study at Durham University, 68% of customers move to a different supplier/provider purely because of the way their first provider treated them. That’s over two thirds of YOUR customers moving to a competitor, not because of your product, but because of the way it was “packaged”. Gone because of something that is totally within your control. Gone, so have to find a new customer to replace them and hope that the same thing doesn’t happen to this new customer.
How on earth do organisations get it so wrong?
Bad Assumptions
From my experience, organisations who struggle with customer service and customer retention do so because they have made some poor assumptions about their clients. Usually based on two general misconceptions:
1. Customers understand and judge your expertise based on their sound judgement of the goods or services you’re providing. Wrong: your customers make judgements about your business based on all sorts of different, odd and emotional reasons. They may well use a logical argument to justify their judgements (post-rationalisation), but don’t be fooled, their judgement is not based on their sound judgement. They don’t understand your business like you do.
2. Non-core areas of business are far less important than the core area. Wrong: If customer don’t make sound judgements of the quality of goods and services, then what do they judge you on? They judge you on how they were treated. They judge you on the experience you gave them, so the non-core areas of business are critical to ensuring that your customers believe that you’re good at what you do.
Non-Core Critical Extras
Don’t get me wrong, your product or service is extremely important. You need to get it right or you will, more than likely, go out of business, but it’s not enough on it’s own. You need to get the non-core areas of your business right too. Those parts of the business that are not essential to performing your core business function (taking photos if you’re a photographer; selling shoes if your a shoe retailer), but that are absolutely critical to your overall success. Your “non-core critical extras”. By critical extras I’m talking about are all the things that make your customers feel good about doing business with you. All the things that make them say, “Wow, I wasn’t expecting that!”
Imagine you are on the phone to a big multi-national company. After negotiating the automated system, you finally get through to a human, and you’re told that they can’t possible deal with the issue, so they put you through to someone else, who asks you to explain the entire issue yet again. When you’ve finished retelling your tale, you’re told that you’ve been put through to the wrong department and you need to talk to the people upstairs. Before you can protest you’re put on hold to listen to ‘Greensleeves’! Eventually a third person picks up, but he too declares innocence and wants to put you through to someone else, but not just anyone else – the person you first spoke to five minutes ago!
When you get off the phone from a call like this all you want to do is tell someone, anyone who will listen and you want to let everyone know never to use this company. EVER!
But wait a minute! What if the opposite was also possible? What if you could give your customers such a great experience, such fantastic service that when they leave you, all they want to do is tell someone how great you are! They just have to tell all there friends that they must buy from you! Guess what! Some companies have seen revenues rise by as much as 40% by giving their customers such a great story to tell.
A story to tell
Imagine you have a leak under your sink. So you call out a plumber. He turns up on time. He does the job. He tidies up and leaves. Great. If one of your friends asks about a plumber you might pass on the number, if you remembered it.
What if you had a leak in the evening and you call the same plumber. He was just on his way out to a posh dinner, but he pops over anyway. When he turns up he’s wearing a smart Dinner suite. A crisp white dress shirt, with a beautiful silk bowtie – hand tied – and a carnation in his button hole. He neatly lays out his tools, completes the job without getting dirt on his pristine attire. He cleans up, smiles and hands you the carnation as he leaves. The next day you’d tell that story to someone, whether they asked about a plumber or not. Now that’s giving your customers a great story to tell.
Giving a great story can not only give you loyal customers, but it can create customer evangelists for your company that not only give you repeat business, but drum up new custom for you as well. Effectively, volunteers for your marketing department.
Two Ingredients
A great story comes from examining every part of your customer’s journey and make sure it’s an awesome experience and there are two ingredients that can help that happen. Getting these two right doesn’t guarantee success, but without these two you are guaranteed to fail.
1. Get the right people, who are passionate about your vision of customer service in the right jobs and let them get on with doing what they are good at, what you employed them for.
2. Provide the right tools and systems to make it as easy as possible for those people in the right jobs to provide consistently great service.
Right People
In order for you to consistently deliver a high quality customer experience you need to have people that believe in your vision and are passionate about making it a reality. People that are with you. This is where companies like McDonalds fail so badly. Where ever you go in the world, if you order a Big Mac, it’s going to be exactly the same. You’ll get the three buns, you’ll get the lettuce. You’ll get the two burgers and you’ll get the little dollop of pink sauce. Exactly the same, anywhere in the world because Ray Croc has provided the tools to do it. He has systemised every part of the process so that any unqualified 16 year old can do it. Unfortunately any unqualified 16 year old does not share the vision of great service at the customer end. They don’t really care about what they’re doing which is why the food is the same, but the experience is shockingly poor. You need to put right people in the right place. People who want to deliver what you have asked for. To do this some companies need to spend more on recruiting the right people and less on training the wrong people.
Rght Tools
Once you have the right people, who are behind your vision then you need to provide them with all the right tools, systems and support to consistently deliver on the promise. To deliver excellence time and time again.
They need to know exactly what good service looks like. They need to know how they are expected to deliver it. They need the freedom to be able to solve problems and issues that arise that don’t fit into the normal agreed patterns. They need to be given not only the responsibility, but also the authority to perform. We’ve all been on the phone trying to solve a problem and the person you’re talking to says, “I can’t make that decision, I’ll have to ask my manager”. I’ve always wondered why they don’t have those powers. If you have the right people in the right jobs doing what they are good at, with the right attitude then they’re going to do what’s right. Give them to tools to do it! In their book “Now discover your strengths”, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton quote a study in which they asked employees whether at work they had the opportunity to do what they do best every day. In companies where employees strongly agreed with this statement, customer satisfaction went up 44%.
AWESOME SERVICE = RISING REVENUE
If you get the right people in the right positions and you give them to right tools you can give your customers an awesome story to tell. You can have your customers spreading the word about your product or service. You can create customer evangelists. You can hold on to your 68% of clients that usually leave and you can gather your competitors 68%. And guess what? Your revenue will go up.
Ben, this is a fabulous piece. I’m surprised no one commented yet. You have done a great job of explaining how companies need to make sure that every encounter is part of the overall retention journey. Unfortunately, too many companies have not learned from Zappos. Zappos’ number one priority is customer service and they make sure they only hire people who care about customers. In a business-to-business environment, most customers do not want to switch vendors. It’s a cumbersome process, but companies basically force customers to start looking by providing lack luster, non caring service. Thanks again for sharing your expertise. Richard Shapiro, The Center For Client Retention