April 19, 2013 What’s the single biggest Customer Service no-no? LeadershipResponsibility Share this post: These days, any self-respecting brand has to consider customer service as an integral part of the consumer experience. This is even more true if the brand is in the high value or luxury sector. Customer service is one of the great ways of humanizing a brand, providing tailored advice and/or service for the particular case of the consumer on the line. Some brands think it best (and oftentimes fittingly) to outsource customer service. I am not going to challenge any particular brand on the economics of this solution; although, I tend to believe that outsourcing your customer relationship is a dangerous affair. The challenge with customer service is being able find a balance between the service component and the cost-omer component. Customer service nightmare stories abound, even when it is homegrown and internal. That said, the point of this post is not to slag off on a poor experience. It is to identify a few areas where some high flying executives may not take the full measure of their actions. There are three key points for excellence in customer service: customer service must be accountable customer service is personal the customer want to be treated as the same individual, no matter the point of contact. No “Personal” email I was recently told by a company’s customer service representative that she would, exceptionally speaking, provide me with her “personal” email at work. It was as if she had bestowed on me a national honor. Now, we are not talking her personal gmail from home. We are talking her direct email at work (as opposed to [email protected]). To make matters worse, she asked that I delete her mail from my address book after sending my mail. It boggles the mind that a very large organization these days will not provide nominative email addresses to clients, much less for communications between customer service and their more loyal customers. A generic email inbox, where there is no graduation made for the type of customer, is a terrific mistake if you are serious about the customer experience. When a customer is obliged to interact with different people in customer service, it is bound to cause heartache because of the lack of continuity. Having an impersonal email inbox tends to send a message that there is no accountability and that satisfaction is unlikely to be guaranteed. Anonymity ≠ Responsibility Just as email should be nominative, a customer service representative should have a name. Hiding behind anonymity is tantamount to passing the buck, literally. Some employees would rather protect their privacy. Alternatively, they have something to hide, as in they do not want to have their name associated with shoddy customer service or a low-rate brand. But, let’s start with a first name (Minter D) or, perhaps, a last name. If the brand is serious about a healthy long-term business, customers deserve someone who will take responsibility for the answer. Some forward-thinking brands crossed that Khyber Pass on Twitter when signing tweets with the customer service representative’s intials, as in “-md.” {Click to tweet!} If a senior exeuctive has not deigned to sign up to Twitter yet, he/she is unlikely to understand these codes and, therefore, is unlikely to decide in favor of a responsible customer service for the sake of cost-cutting. Cust-cutting-omer service is a bad shortcut. Yet another reason, I say, why executives must up their digital IQ! Customer-centric data If there is one thing that gets me quickly irritated, it is when I need to explain my case more than once to the same company. How is it that my case has not already been logged, I tend to ask myself? Of course, there are qualifications to this expectation, but I do find it galling that one needs to repeat one’s situation. Much like when you key in your credit card or telephone number after dialling in and then still have to repeat the number anyway to the live voice who finally answers. The ability for a company to organize its customer knowledge and spread it out to the necessary parties in a timely fashion should be considered of strategic import. Good customer service means walking in their shoes With all these cases above, senior executives tend not to relate to them. Whether it’s because they don’t deal with these issues personally, because they have alternative “hotlines” or because they are not social media-savvy, senior executives rarely walk the customer’s path, in the customer’s shoes. Thus, they may not properly gauge the impact of an unsatisfactory service. When was the last time the CEO tried calling in him or herself and experienced the joys of a looped automatic answering service or a head office call center that is not equiped to take messages? Senior leaders must walk the talk and put on the customers’ shoes more frequently in order to make the right decisions. {Click to tweet!} Otherwise, it is only too easy to view customer service as an expensive expense or a necessary evil as opposed to a positive, brand-building opportunity. What other big no no’s are there when considering excellence in customer service? Please do share your stories and/or thoughts! NEWSletter Subscribe to Minter’s Bi-Weekly NEWSletter and receive a free copy of the exclusive and updated 8 Golden Rules of an eReputation Your Gift For Signing Up 8 Golden Rules of an eReputation SUBSCRIBE! You have Successfully Subscribed! brand building, branding, costomer service, customer service, email address, leadership, loyalty, personalized service Minter Dial Minter Dial is an international professional speaker, author & consultant on Leadership, Branding and Digital Strategy. After a successful international career at L’Oréal, Minter Dial returned to his entrepreneurial roots and has spent the last ten years helping senior management teams and Boards to adapt to the new exigencies of the digitally enhanced marketplace. He has worked with world-class organisations to help activate their brand strategies, and figure out how best to integrate new technologies, digital tools, devices and platforms. Above all, Minter works to catalyse a change in mindset and dial up transformation. Minter received his BA in Trilingual Literature from Yale University (1987) and gained his MBA at INSEAD, Fontainebleau (1993). His newest book Heartificial Empathy, Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence, bowed in December 2018 and won the Book Excellence Award 2019 as well as being shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2019. It's available in Audiobook, Kindle and Paperback. He is also co-author of Futureproof (Pearson, Sep 2017) and sole author of The Last Ring Home (Myndset Press, Nov 2016), a book and documentary film, both of which have won awards and critical acclaim. Minter has a new book on leadership, You Lead, How being yourself makes you a better leader, published by Kogan Page, that released January 2021. It's easy to inquire about booking Minter Dial here. View all posts by Minter Dial Previous post Next post
Email marketing: Is transparency the opposite of anonymous? | The Myndset by Minter Dial April 30, 2013 at 4:51 pm […] traffic to a site. Notwithstanding the true garbage spam, there are several other classes of email pollution. For exmample, you receive (1) terribly impersonal mails to which you might have voluntarily […]
Email marketing: Is transparency the opposite of anonymous? | The Myndset by Minter Dial April 30, 2013 at 4:51 pm […] traffic to a site. Notwithstanding the true garbage spam, there are several other classes of email pollution. For exmample, you receive (1) terribly impersonal mails to which you might have voluntarily […]
Getting to be Customer Centric... really December 2, 2013 at 7:55 pm […] They are simultaneously less trusting and more demanding. And, for the salesperson or the customer service representative who are on the front line, the need is to be able to coordinate the knowledge of and […]
Getting to be Customer Centric... really December 2, 2013 at 7:55 pm […] They are simultaneously less trusting and more demanding. And, for the salesperson or the customer service representative who are on the front line, the need is to be able to coordinate the knowledge of and […]