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When Customers Make Mistakes

May 14, 2007 By Leave a Comment

heart-gift.jpgEveryone makes mistakes sometimes.  How you treat your customers when they make one is just as important as how you recover when you make one!  Often, we are so concerned about our customers “working the system”, we fail to help customers when they truly need our grace.

I had a great example of a company doing it right yesterday: Disney.  For Mother’s Day, I decided to take my two sons (a pre-teen and a teen) to Disneyland, where we are season ticket holders.  At 7 am as we were getting ready to leave the house (we only live one hour away!), I went to grab our Disney Annual Passports from their designated spot.  I couldn’t find the passport for my younger son.  Concerned this would be a costly loss, but with two boys anxious to leave, I grabbed the passports we did have and got in the car.

I was misdirected once upon my arrival at Disneyland but finally spoke with a gal at the ticket booths about my plight.  She asked me, “Is the Annual Passport misplaced, or is it lost?”  Not entirely sure, my hopeful answer was that it was misplaced, as we didn’t have a lot of time to look that morning. 

Surprisingly, she said, “In that case, we can give you a temporary pass good for one day so you can enjoy the parks.  Next time you return, if you haven’t yet found your Annual Passport, you will need to get a replacement for $20.”

This was a huge deal for me!  I am sure we will locate the missing season ticket when we have a little more time to search through jeans and purses at home.  It was a nice relief not to have to take extra time to process a new one, not to mention saving money by not having to replace it!  Most parks I have been to have required you to pay for a missing or stolen season ticket, even though they have your information in the system.  Disneyland looked up my son’s name, birthday, and address and issued the temporary replacement immediately.

What do you do when your customers have made a mistake?  Do you give them grace, as Disneyland did for us yesterday?  Or do you require them to jump through hoops?  A one-time reprieve for a customer where you want to build a relationship won’t be forgotten!

(Photo credit: Kosta Ino)

Filed Under: Customer experience, Customer loyalty, Customer service

Weekend reading

May 11, 2007 By 5 Comments

blog.jpgI thought I would share a few great links to get you thinking over the weekend.  Enjoy!

Demanding Excellent Service

Christy Brewer over at the Quicken Loans blog The Diff shares a frustration many of us share that focus on the customer: we analyze the experience everywhere we go!  Much like the joke about the psychologist constantly analyzing friends, Christy tells the story of how she has analyzed her experiences at the hardware store and at a medical office.  She and I must be long-lost kin, because this paragraph sounds so much like something I would blog:

Providing great customer service is not hard. In fact, the more you do it, you realize that it’s actually easier to be excellent in the first place, rather than trying to fix the experience after turning off a client or customer. Great customer service really does boil down to the simple things. Anticipating needs and then meeting them. Listening like you are doing the talking.  Doing what you say you will do.

Keep the faith, Christy!  We can spread the word and help change the world more quickly than you think.

The Southwest Airlines Conversation

Geoff Livingston of the Buzz Bin has a great interview with Brian Lusk from Southwest Airlines as their blog, Nuts About Southwest, celebrates its first anniversary.  The Southwest blog is truly an ongoing customer conversation where customers have influenced major airline decisions.  Many employees have started to participate as well, both by blogging and by leaving comments.  Here is a quote from Brian about these customer-employee blog conversations:

They simply are conversations you might have with any friend, and we consider our participants to be our friends. But, it builds relationships with our Customers. This is very similar to the relationships our Station and Inflight Employees build with their regular Customers.

The interview also discusses the way Southwest participates in the customer conversation and truly shows their customers Southwest cares about what they think.  An excellent interview! Special thanks to Toby Bloomberg of the Diva Marketing Blog for highlighting this post.

Filed Under: Customer experience, Customer service, Voice of the customer

Best Practices for Rockin’ the Online Experience

May 10, 2007 By 2 Comments

rockin.jpgThe online service and support experience is a key factor in driving customer satisfaction and loyalty.  How can we create an online experience that really rocks?  Today’s post concludes our three-part series in looking at the customer service and support online experience (see links to parts one and two below) as we look at customer needs and the Top Ten best practices for the online customer experience.  These practices apply to almost all online experiences, not just service and support!

The online service and support experience will rock when there is alignment between the customer experience and these five key areas:

An effective online experience facilitates consistent interactions, cultivates customer trust, creates relevant experiences, coordinates all touchpoints, but most importantly, an effective online experience is viewed from the customer perspective.

Customer Needs

Customers are different not only in what they expect from online service and support but also in what they need to accomplish online.  It is important to align the needs of your customers with the experience you are designing for them.  For example, the needs of a customer who is technically savvy (let me see what the engineers see) is very different from the needs of a customer who may be more technically challenged(please help step me through this).  Which needs are you trying to meet?  Does your online experience assume everyone has the same needs?

Online support experiences that ROCK create different profiles, or views, for different customers.  They can be acccessed either by logging in to a saved profile or by self-selecting a path.  Ideally, the customer would then see a page designed “just for them”, pre-loaded with their products and the relevant materials they have requested.  The experience from that point on should be consistent with the needs of the customer.  I had one recent experience where I had downloaded software and was asked if I wanted to watch a video to help me figure out how to use it.  As videos are often used in technical support to step-through things for customers who are not as tech-savvy, I clicked on it to see what it would show me (I am always testing out experiences!).  Here is what I saw:

The video content presented here requires JavaScript to be enabled and the latest version of the Macromedia Flash Player.  If you are using a browser wtih JavaScript disabled please enable it now.

This message is not exactly friendly to the customer that is not a computer expert! 

Once customer needs are understood, the best customer experience anticipates those needs.  If we know most customers want to come to our support site to download drivers, we should place that capability in a position on the support main page (or possibly the company home page) that is easy to access.  This saves the customer time and reduces misdirection.

Using Top Practices that ROCK!

There are ten top practices that help create a rockin’ online service and support experience.

Top Ten List

10. Three clicks gets you there- A customer should be able to accomplish their task very quickly online.  If it isn’t easy, this channel will be abandoned.

9. Support pathing helps manage the experience - A guided path through the site will keep customers on-track.  This requires planning out the experience!

8. Use profiles and personalization to keep it relevant – Best practice companies use customer information to populate pages with customer information they already have.  This makes the customer experience easier and less complex to navigate.

7. Use Web 2.0 techniques that make sense to create dialogue – Turning customer service and support from a one-way information push to a 2-way dialogue helps organizations learn more about what information is helpful to customers.

6. Keep the site simple – Giving customers fewer choices, rather than every option under the sun, makes the experience less frustrating.

5. Serve customers in the way they want to be served – Ask customers which service and support channels they prefer to use, then allow them to use that channel (even if it isn’t the channel you prefer they use).

4. Align with live support as needed, easily and transparently- Best practice companies realize there are times a customer needs to interact with a live person.   Help customers get there quickly, and make sure the information they have already given you online is transferred on with the inquiry.

3. Measure, monitor, and improve what matters to customers – Measuring customer success is just as, if not more important than measuring how many calls were deflected from the call center!

2. Deliver a consistent online support experience- Best practice companies use what they have learned about their customers to create consistency among all online touchpoints (email, chat, search, blogs, etc.).

And the number one top practice…

1. View the quality of the customer experience as a competitive differentiator. 

Companies that embrace the customer experience as a competitive differentiator are already a step ahead of their competitors.  They become the measuring rod for all other experiences.  Is your organization setting the pace or still trying to measure up?  Creating a rockin’ online service and support experience occurs when you have created a customer strategy,  understood your customer expectations and needs, used that understanding to craft an online experience your customers will use effectively, and when you are continually improving and learning from customer interactions as well as from best practices. 

The online channel is much more than a place to cut customer service and support costs.  It is a place to cement your customer relationships.  Rock on!

Filed Under: Customer experience, Customer service, Customer strategy, Technical support

Rockin’ our customer’s experience online

May 9, 2007 By 4 Comments

at-sign.jpgThe online experience, especially for customer service and support, is a key factor that drives customer satisfaction and loyalty.  How can we create an online experience that really rocks?  This post focuses on the customer experience for service and support; note that many aspects of this post apply to other online experiences as well! 

The online experience rocks when there is alignment in these five key areas:

  • Customer strategy
  • Customer expectations
  • Customer needs
  • Optimized service and support capabilities
  • The use of top practices that ROCK!

Today, I will discuss the first two areas, customer strategy and customer expectations.  I covered optimized capabilities last week.  Tomorrow, I will continue this topic by looking at customer needs and best practices for online customer experiences.

Customer Strategy

Does your organization have a customer strategy?  Most companies have a product strategy and a marketing strategy.  Customer-centric organizations also have a customer strategy.  Put simply, a customer strategy is a proactive plan for how we want to acquire, retain, and grow our customers!  Too many organizations leave it to chance when it comes to retention and growth of customers, focusing most of their resources on customer acquisition.  Why would we want to leave the management of our most valuable asset, our customers, to chance?

In order to align our customer experience with our customer strategy, we need to consider how we have created that strategy.  A strong customer strategy is built around the interactions we have with our customers, and we are able to maximize the value of every customer touch.  In other words,  we make each impression with the customer count.  Customer service and support may have several opportunities to make customer impressions, and it is often where the rubber meets the road.  How do we handle our customers when there is a problem or a question?  The goal of all these interactions is to increase customer retention and loyalty, which ultimately leads to repeat business and referrals.  Done right, a customer strategy will also build customer trust, strengthen the relationship, and add value to both the customer and the company.

Customer Expectations

Understanding customer expectations of service and support is the second key to creating an online experience that rocks.  Unless we understand the expectations, we cannot begin to know if we have met, much less exceeded those expectations.  Research (Gartner) shows there are five expectations of service and support which are consistent with many online customers with an issue to resolve.  First and foremost, customers prefer not to have a service or support experience at all!  It would be better if we could prevent the problem from taking place.  Assuming there will be some problems that need resolving, here are the other four expectations:

  • Customers want to have quick response times
  • Customers want to have their problem fixed, ideally the first time
  • Customers want to feel that someone cares about them and their problem
  • Customers need to feel using online service and support is as easy, if not easier, than calling on the phone for assistance

In addition to understanding customer expectations, we need to understand our organization’s goals for online service and support.  How does the customer’s goal differ from the company’s goal?  Do customers want to use the web for technical support?  Some companies push customers to use online channels in order to reduce their own costs.   Is your company’s goal to reduce costs, or is it to serve customers the way they want to be served?

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes.  Analyze what your online service and support experience looks like from their perspective.  Then, look at the online experiences of your competitors (which customers may also be using!).  Which experiences are better at meeting customer expectations?  Which ones ROCK?

While you are at it, analyze other websites your customers may be using.  Sites such as iTunes and Amazon have great customer experiences that set expectations for how we use the web.  Even B2B customers are consumers in their off-hour, and their online service and support expectations are affected by these types of sites.  A great resource for understanding how customers view their online experiences in various industries is the Customer Respect Group.  See their industry reports for summaries and rankings of large companies by industry.   One can learn a lot by seeing who is doing it well and who is not from the customer’s perspective.

Check back here tomorrow for the rest of the story!

(Excerpted from my presentation yesterday at the SSPA Best Practices conference, San Diego, CA)

(Photo credit: ErickN)

Filed Under: Customer experience, Customer service, Customer strategy, Technical support

Are you cool?

May 7, 2007 By 8 Comments

sunglasses.jpgPeter Kim posted this past week about the idea of Chasing Cool.  He references a book by that name written by two very smart businessmen, Noah Kerner and Gene Pressman.  Peter says this about his own experiences with companies trying to “chase cool”:

I’ve been lucky enough to see cool from two perspectives, working at two brands in the footwear industry on opposite sides of the fence.  One was cool.  The other was chasing it desperately.  The problem with the latter is captured perfectly in the quote above the image at left.  The secret of the former was its authenticity.

I agree with Peter that authenticity in a brand and in its employees is very cool.  Customers can always smell when you aren’t being authentic (like in another one of Peter’s posts on J.P. Morgan Chase and Co and doing what’s wrong for the customer).

What really makes a company cool?  Flashy advertising?  Customer-generated commercials?  The use of social media?  A strong youth following of a consumer product?

In my opinion, what makes a company cool is when it delivers what its customers are looking for.  Companies that are highly in-tune with their customers build great two-way relationships with them over time.  Customers start to share how cool that company is because it treats them the way they want to be treated.  They are “customers rock!” companies.

Think about companies that are “cool”.  Apple with its iPod is cool not because they have a strong following of the young and young-at-heart.  Apple made it easy, really easy for customers to download their music.

What do your customers want to do with your products and services?  Are you meeting their needs?  If you don’t know your customers well enough to answer that question, then all the social media in the world isn’t going to make you cool.  You most likely will fall into that “uncool” category when you can’t be authentic because you don’t know your customers.  Start the customer conversation, get to know them and their needs, and be on your way to cool!

Filed Under: B2B Marketing, Customer experience, Customer strategy, Marketing Blogs

Comparing Experiences

May 4, 2007 By 11 Comments

compare.jpgDoes a travel website compete with a bank?  From a customer experience standpoint, yes, it does!  I was asked to speak to a combination class of marketing and advertising students at University of California San Diego Extension this past Tuesday.  My topic was customer-centric marketing and advertising, and we discussed how to market experiences rather than products.

As I said to the class, customers are more empowered than ever before.  They have more choices in the marketplace.  They are better informed via the internet and the amount of research they do before making buying decisions.  They are collaborating both with each other as well as with organizations in many new ways. 

They also have higher expectations than ever before.  No longer are customers willing to settle for mediocre experiences.  Every touch point at each organization, both B2B and B2C, creates an impression of that brand and its products and services that is colored by other touches at that organization, as well as touches at other organizations.  I may be an executive for a large high tech company putting my servers out to bid, and my expectations are created not just through my business dealings but also by my experiences as a consumer.

I asked the class to share with me their worst and best experiences.  The worst experience was for a travel website.  The student, an enthusiastic marketer with experience in business, had booked a hotel using their services.  When she arrived at her destination, she had major problems with the reservation, which had not been executed properly.  She was very unhappy about her experience.

The best experience was shared by one of the professors whose wife also owns our local bakery, The Village Mill Bread Company in Carmel Valley (San Diego).   The owners usually head to their local bank at certain times during the day to make sure they have the change they need.  In this instance, it was during the Christmas holidays and they couldn’t break away to make it to the bank.  Their banker, realizing they must be busy, got in the car and came to them at the bakery, money in hand.  The owners were incredibly grateful for the assistance!

When I asked the student if she would use the travel website again, she said no, definitely not.  When I asked the professor if he intends to stay with his bank, he gave me an emphatic YES and they bring free bread to the banker on a weekly basis as a thank you (and it is 6 months later!).

Having an experience like the one from the travel site is very disappointing, and it is not a surprise that their customer has left them from this one experience.  Now, let’s focus on the positive experience.  The professor has had wonderful customer service from this individual; hopefully, that same attitude permeates the rest of the bank’s employees!  His expectations have now been set for excellent service.  Although he may not expect every establishment he deals with to have that same level of service, the bar has been raised for what great customer service looks like.  Subconsciously, he will be comparing other experiences to that one.

Your customers are comparing similar experiences as they deal with top-notch customer-focused organizations.  What is your organization’s customer experience?  Will it meet or exceed customer expectations?  If you don’t know, go put two things into play.

1. Find out what your customers are expecting from you and from others.  What do they consider great customer service?  What would set one experience apart from another?

2. Do some detective work on your own organization.  What does it feel like to be your customer?  Either do some “mystery shopping” or bring someone in who can do it for you with an unbiased perspective.  What happens when you call your own customer service?  Where does that phone number really go that is listed in your marketing campaign?  Are your websites directing customers to the right places?

Once you have done this legwork, you are ready to create the experiences you want your customers to have.   This kind of planning will strengthen your brand as well as lay the foundation for building strong customer relationships.

Related post: Who Are You Competing With?

(Photo credit: Eraxion)

Filed Under: B2B Marketing, Customer experience, Customer service, Marketing Blogs

RSS Made Simple!

May 2, 2007 By 2 Comments

rss.jpgIf you have been a regular reader of my blog, you know that I strive to write something positive on the first of every month.  One Positive Day was started by the very smart Kevin Hillstrom at MineThatDatato keep the blogosphere an encouraging place to be!  Well, better late than never, so here is my post for May.

My positive post is about a little video which explains, in a very simple fashion, how to use RSS to subscribe to and read blogs.  The video was created by commoncraft and has been widely circulated on the web.   You can watch the video on commoncraft’s site or on YouTube (sorry I can ‘t post it here, but WordPress.com doesn’t allow that!).

I love this video for a few reasons.  One, it explains RSS “in plain English”.  We bloggers use an awful lot of jargon, and it is great to see this (mostly) jargon-free explanation.  Second, a lot of my non-blogging clients have told me they don’t have time to read blogs or don’t know how to do it.  This video will open their eyes about how RSS can actually help save them time and still be able to keep up with blogs.  Third, it takes things from the customer’s perspective, which I always advocate!

It is also just a fun video to watch, as it is created with paper, pen, and whiteboard.  Low-tech but very effective!

Let me know if you find this video helpful, especially if you don’t subscribe to this blog via RSS.  Keep spreading the word on blogging!

(Photo: Bibigon)

Filed Under: Blogging, Customer experience
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