I have been writing about how to get your first 100 customers the last four weeks. So far during this beautiful journey, we covered:
And here we are now with the last article in the series. Part V - a.k.a. le grand finale - "Perfect Your Customer Service."
As a final and highly important step in getting your 100 customers (accelerating customer acquisition and retention, thereafter), you need to make sure you have service quality top of mind. A top notch customer experience will ensure your clientele are delighted so they become loyal brand advocates and also bring all their friends to the party!
Now let's break down what we mean exactly by service quality.
SERVICE QUALITY
Service quality is the measure of how much and how well an organization understands its users' needs and fulfills their expectations. According to a report by Oracle, 73% of customers remain loyal because of positive interactions with customer support. A high quality customer service keeps clientele engaged with the business and product. It can make or break the business in fact, as it is a measure of how much the business values its customers - and believe me, customers want to feel valued and listened to and will (at least in the long run) pay you more for it! A good customer service can help organizations boost sales and increase customer retention. Not only is customer loyalty important in that it reduces marketing costs (you don't need to market to existing customers as much!) but it also encourages the word-of-mouth effect making your customers into brand ambassadors.
The 5 dimensions of service quality are:
Reliability
Tangibility
Responsiveness and Timeliness
Service Quality Assurance
Customer-Centricity
You might ask these questions when assessing service quality:
Is your product offering consistent and reliable? Consistency all year round will not only increase the probability that your product will operate as desired but also ensure there aren't as many customer service requests or issues you have to manage. Best customer service is if the customer doesn't have to contact you in the first place. It saves time, energy, and inconvenience for all involved!
Do your customers perceive a palpable sense of quality in the level of services being offered to them? Customer perception of service is usually derived from your marketing campaigns, brand images, and word of mouth. A great example of the wildfire effect, millions of people on the internet heard about Zappos customer service agent same-day delivering wedding shoes to a customer who had ordered the wrong kind and had their wedding in a few days. While it wasn’t even their mistake and it was costly to find and deliver the shoes with fast shipping, this level of service quality stuck with the customer in question as well as everyone else who heard, read, wrote, posted, talked, texted, tweeted about it. Zappos was aligned to its WOW customer service philosophy, and made a name for itself!
How responsive are you to your customers? How long does it take for you to respond to them? In this day and age, people expect responses fast. At the same time, we are all frustrated with canned responses that come fast but reveal the person (or robot) on the other end didn’t really make a point to understand the issue and instead was optimizing for speed. The sweet spot is somewhere in between. For stellar service quality, it’s important you take your time to understand the issue at hand, investigate, come up with a solution and get back to the customer. If it’s taking an unusually long time to get your answer or resolve the issue at hand, write back to the customer explaining to them what you have put in motion, what you expect when, and provide reassurance and potentially even a good will gesture to compensate for the delay. Don't have them wait and wonder but also don't give them a canned response that doesn't really address their concern.
Do you/your customer service agents build trust with the customers? Make sure you invest time to relay trust to the customers, as trust is paramount in getting confidence in people to stick with the organization as opposed to switching to the competition. Honesty and transparency as well as genuine care tend to be the top 3 qualities you can demonstrate to win the trust of your customers (or everyone else you deal with in life for that matter!) Be honest, admit to mistakes, emphathize with, apologize for, and compensate for the inconvenience. Where you have earned trust, share your customer testimonials and reviews where applicable to build trust with a wider audience. According to BigCommerce, "72% of consumers say positive reviews and testimonials make them trust a brand more, and 88% trust online reviews and treat them as personal recommendations." Build trust, spread the word, stay tuned in, listen to and action feedback. (My recent blog post about feedback here)
Do you put users / customers first (and not just say it)? Do your users / customers feel understood and valued? Understanding the consumer’s use case, how the product will be useful to them, guiding them and helping them in achieving their goals, and being empathetic to their needs is a very important process for an organization. What separates a human from a bot is the ability to empathize with your customer and make them feel valued. Similar to the above point, it's important you are honest and emphathatic to their needs and put the user first (and not your profit) and long-term profit will follow!
So what can be done to ensure top notch service quality?
1. Invest in Good Customer Service Training: A thorough, well-thought through training will add value to your customer service team, make sure they understand your products, your values, your goals, and their incentives. It will also ensure consistency and quality across the customer service touchpoints. Make sure they receive good and engaging training so they can grasp and embrace the concepts and the material, and also feel connected to the company and the team at large. I have witnessed and experienced "training" in the form of reading some print-outs or boring online material too many times. When presented in this form, it signals a box-checking exercise and is not only unhelpful in most cases but is also a stab to employee morale. If one of the first things you do after you hire them is to bore them, they will not feel the vibes.
2. Invest in Solid Customer Service Platforms: Having a great Help Center so people can self service themselves when issues arise will save you and the customers time and hassle, in turn reducing costs and increasing serviceability. Also important is to invest in chatbots (ones that actually work ideally!), online chat platforms, call centers, email teams to make sure you can handle customer queries with care. Some well-known customer service platforms that have built in AI-powered features and efficiency provoking integrations are Salesforce, Zendesk, Intercom. You do not need to pay for or use these tools, however. Traditional methods such as email, phone, or whatsapp are perfectly sufficient, as long as you have the right resources behind them.
Naturally, the more scalable you can make your solutions, the better - therefore, as you log customer queries, make sure they go into a pre-built system where they are triaged, categorized, and analyzed. The most common three issues, for example, can help you identify what the frequently asked questions are and you might build project teams to solve them at root cause by tweaking the product design, the instructions manual, or creating training material (e.g. a webinar) to educate and empower customers. That way, you use customer queries not only as opportunities to delight and retain them, but also to improve the products and services in the long term.
3. Put in motion the right incentives and business metrics, and track them effectively: Ensuring your people have a clear picture of their performance metrics will make it easier for them to identify opportunities for customer success and individual recognition. Make sure the metrics are aligned to customer goals, business success, and individual ability. The metrics should be realistically ambitious. For example, if you expect the employees to get 100% CSAT from 100 queries a week - that might be unrealistic. Even if the customer service agent is incredible and has done everything right, there might be 1 angry customer (for reasons outside the control of the agent) that negs the feedback form, hence lowering the agent's CSAT score. This might incentivize the agent to do sketchy things like look for ways to only accept happy customers (and let her colleagues take the angry ones), negotiate side deals with the customers (e.g. i"f you give me a high CSAT rating after this call, I will throw in a voucher") or just be demotivated all together ("there is no way I am hitting my target anyway, so I might as well not even try") Allow for anomolies and errors that are outside the control of the agent to make the target realistic but ambitious (it shouldn't be too easy to achieve either) Some common customer service KPIs are: Total Resolution Time (TRT), Turnaround Time (TAT), Time to First Response (TTFR), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Ticket Volume. Once you put the right metrics in place, make sure you also have a fair and easy to understand tracking system (e.g. a dashboard) that is visible to agents as well as their managers / leadership, measure and discuss with employees regularly.
4. Encourage honest customer feedback. Process and circle back on the feedback: Making it easy for customers to give feedback through forms (e.g. CSAT form), Help Centers (by clicking a button to rate their experience), through customer interviews, and incentivizing them (e.g. you might give them $ awards for their feedback, you might invite them to an event if they give feedback, you might give them one month free of your service, etc.) will pay off in the long run. You will not only have an open channel for understanding your customers needs, wants, and pain points, but you will also be able to understand and validate what is working so you can continue on the same path / double down on it. Remember feedback is a gift (read my blog post about feedback) - so make sure you thank your customers for their valuable time and feedback, and where applicable circle back on it. Tell them that you have thought about it and made certain changes, thanks to their input and suggestions. It will encourage them to give you more feedback (win), make them feel valued and invested in the success of your business (double win), and it will make others gain trust for your organization too (yet another win) assuming you make the response to the feedback public and/or they share with their friends and network.
5. Overcompensate for mistakes or failures: As previously discussed in the case of Zappos, a failure or mistake is an opportunity to make your customers even more loyal (than if there was no mistake in the first place) If there is a mistake that's being flagged to you, take it as an opportunity to overcompensate for it so much so that your customer is in the end grateful the mistake happened. A good example of this is if you own a restaurant and you served the customer the wrong dish (say, the waiter misunderstood the order) you might ask the customer to keep the wrong dish, bring them the right dish also (albeit late) and not charge them for either! While you might think this might cost you in the short term (you gave two dishes for free!) you earned the trust and loyalty of this customer and potentially also their friends so it's a long term win - and a substantial one!
6. Streamline processes, invest in consistency: According to a recent McKinsey report, it's not enough to make customers satisfied and delighted with each interaction --- it's more powerful to make them consistently happy and to deliver a consistent and what will become an expected level of service across all products and services. That is because, "by using a variety of channels and triggering more and more interactions with companies as they seek to meet discrete needs, customers create clusters of interactions that make their individual interactions less important than their cumulative experience. This customer journey can span all elements of a company and include everything from buying a product to actually using it, having issues with a product that require resolution, or simply making the decision to use a service or product for the first time." A recent McKinsey customer-experience survey of some 27,000 American consumers across 14 different industries found that effective customer journeys are more important: measuring satisfaction on customer journeys is 30 percent more predictive of overall customer satisfaction than measuring happiness for each individual interaction. In addition, maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20 percent but also to lift revenue by up to 15 percent while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20 percent. Read more here.
And finally...
7. Get it right the first time: When it comes to customer service, consumers want their answers when they first contact you - they don't want to have to wait or to be called back, to be emailed later, and even worse, to have to contact you again! On one of my first months at a sales job many years ago, a customer I had cold called said at the end of a half hour interaction that they had spoken to many people from my company before on different occasions and had never received such service and care from anyone else ever before. They felt heard, understood, and educated. They were going to be able to solve their problems and also use some of the suggestions I had in using our product -- features and possibilities they didnt't know they didn't know. I felt honored and thoroughly complimented - especially since I was still fairly new at the job. A strange feeling stayed with me though (because I am a bit of a perfectionist at heart) and that's why I share this story here: It was curious that they were unable to receive the same level of service and care I was willing to provide them with (nothing too spectacular!) in answering some of the product feature questions and provide solutions to their issues. It was a compliment to me personally but a super frustrating experience for the customer having to be in the dark, keep calling, reaching out, to then be able to get answers from someone who cold calls them with the intention to upsell to them. What was it that I did differently and why was it different? What stopped our company from getting it right the first time? I may not know the perfect answer to this question but I do know hiring the right talent, training and onboarding them (with rigor and passion!), providing them with the right incentives, recognizing and rewarding good performance, as well as focusing on consistent and empathatic service constitute the components of a fast and thorough solution customer experience.
Congratulations on delighting your customers so they stay with you and tell all their friends about your business too! This article concludes my Getting Your First 100 Customer series. I'll be back next week with a different thought experiment. Thank you for reading my series (or at least this piece) - Connect with me at leadrisecoaching@gmail.com if you have any questions / comments / experiences you would like to share on getting your first 100 customers!
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