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Haven’t You Got Smaller Fish to Fry?

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A Guest Post by
Rosemary O’Neill

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If you’re a small business or a consultant, Fortune 500 clients are a rush. Impressive logos can adorn your sidebar, you can impress your grandma with how successful you are, and credibility is yours. However, it’s very important to treat every customer as if they are your “marquee” client.

And here’s a secret:

The small fry customers aren’t used to being treated like a VIP, so they are easier to delight.

Here are a few more reasons why the small fish deserve TLC:

  • Small fry grow up to be big – that lower-tier administrator you’re dealing with may get a promotion or move to another company and suddenly be the decision-maker.
  • The neighbor effect – the woman who runs that small business could refer you to her neighbor, who is VP of Something Important at a Fortune 500.
  • Large quantities of small fry make a steady revenue stream – if you’re reliant on the good graces of a few big companies for your revenue, you’re in a precarious position.
  • Smaller organizations can be easier to deal with – it’s much easier to get access to the decision-maker at a smaller organization.

Never burn bridges – if you try every day to delight everyone who comes in contact with your business, including the “nobodies” with no money to spend, you are building goodwill equity that comes back to you when you least expect it.

If you pay close attention, your individual small fry will build into a net-bursting haul.

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Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work on the Internet. Check out their blog. You can find her on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Are Your Customers Embedded?

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A Guest Post by
Rosemary ONeill

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Last week, my husband and I went out to eat at a new restaurant. It was obviously a family-owned affair. While we were waiting for our food, a guy appeared out of the kitchen hoisting aloft a plate of hot wings. He said, “these are for anyone who wants to try them.” Of course, I had to try them, and they were excellent.

I asked the guy what they were called. He said, “I don’t know, they don’t have a name yet, what do you suggest?” I laughingly said, “call them Rosemary’s Wings!” He said, “we just might do that.”

Do you think I might be curious to revisit that restaurant to see whether my wings are on the menu? You bet. And if they are, do you think I’m likely to return again and again? Yessiree.

That restaurant has the same opportunity all business owners have—to literally embed customers in the business. At my company, we’ve had a long-standing tradition of making little gestures that weave customers into our daily work; naming features after them, using their names on documentation, hiding “Easter Eggs” in the code, and thanking them for suggestions that lead to new software features.

Once a customer has been “embedded,” they have a feeling of investment that is very hard to break, as if your business is their personal project.

What are you doing to make it personal? Is there a small crazy gesture you can make that will earn you a customer-for-life?

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Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work on the Internet. Check out their blog. You can find her on Twitter as @rhogroupee

How To Socially Date Customers.

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A Post by Matt Krautstrunk

We all know how important customer service is to your long term success as a business. You probably don’t need a briefing on that, so I’ll spare you the lecture on why the “customer is always right.” However, what you probably haven’t realized is the fact that customer relationships are becoming more fragile.

 

We all remember the days, going to the local grocery store with our parents, and having the employees greet us by name. Loyalty is a wonderful thing; however something seems to have changed since the 50’s. Customer relationships aren’t what they used to be, they are becoming more fragile than ever. As businesses strive to create relationships it seems one negative experience can cause a breakup, according to Social Media Paige, “negative online shopping experiences result in brand abandonment. Smart consumers are very unforgiving.72 percent said they would share a negative online experience with friends and family. Another 70 percent said they would turn to a competitor as a result.”

Many managers also fail to realize how important social media is to their customer service. Whether you are trying to attract new customers or keep existing customers engaged, having a social presence gives your company a platform to reach your audience. I think businesses who try to “date” their community are able to retain a higher percentage of customers for life.

Link Multiple People To Your Businesses Social Account. Putting your PR, customer service and sales people on the same account, not only improves your reach but integrates your customer knowledge. Say for instance you only have one PR professional running your Twitter, he/she may not realize who they are actually speaking with. Having an integrated internal social media account improves your communication strategy by leveraging knowledge across multiple units. A good idea would be to add email contacts to your social networks from multiple accounts within your business. You can use your salespeople’s, marketing department, and anyone you deem fit’s email address book to upload their contacts and follow them.

Although it’s important to integrate your internal departments on social networks, make sure they understand their roles. Have your sales person answer all sales inquiries, and all customer inquiries be handled by customer service.

Build Loyalty. Building loyalty is essentially taking your customers on dates. Keep your community engaged, active and excited about your brand. When the spark dies, you are much more willing to have a tragic breakup. Do this u

Solve Simple Problems Transparently A major advantage of conducting your customer service on social media is the fact that everything you do is transparent. Other followers will see your activity and you generate good PR for every issue you’ve solved. Don’t limit yourself on these platforms; figuring out how to work in social in to your strategy will help you keep your date for longer.

Keeping a customer for life is one of the most valuable things any business can ask for. We all know that 80% of business comes from 20% of your customers, so it makes sense to make sure that these people are happy to the fullest extent.

Matt Krautstrunk is an expert writer on postage meters based in San Diego, California.  He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions at Resource Nation.

 

 

Customer Service or torture?

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by Patty Azzarello

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service-or-torture

Be careful what you measure…

BMW serves as a good example of a company that measures service vs. providing it.   But many companies fall into this trap.  Does yours?

Here is an example of what I mean:

My last car service:

  • I felt bullied by the sales and service people when they told me, as they do each time, that I “have to give them a 5 on everything” when the survey people call.
  • That is not service for me.  It’s gaming the measures for them, (and torturing me).
  • In my last car service, they failed to reset some system.  A warning light came on, and I was forced to go back.  It really screwed up my day.
  • When they realized it was their fault, I got only a cursory, “sorry about that”.
  • After telling them, “you know, when the survey people call, I am not going to give you a 5 this time” and giving them several opportunities to make it better – “Is there something you would like to do for me to improve my experience”? – there was no response.
  • I then gave the low scores on the phone survey – by the way, the survey taker/process is designed only to ask the questions, not to offer any service when someone is upset.
  • Later I got a call from my service guy. It was clear he was forced to call me to follow up on his low score. But the call was about him giving me a hard time because I got him in trouble. (more torture for me)
  • As much fun as that was for me, I decided to give them another opportunity.  I said to him – “actually I was going to call you because I need two other [small things], can you help me?”
  • Now here was a chance to provide actual service, when no one was watching or measuring.  He assured me he would call me back later that afternoon to let me know if he had the part so I could stop by on my way home.
  • I never heard from him again.

Do your measures and service processes serve your customers or torture them?
Example:

Do you measure the speed of closing problems?

This is a very typical measure.  But it’s important to understand that this measure can cause you to ignore customer problems, because your service staff is motivated to close out problems quickly, vs. take the time to actually fix them, because spending that time would result in a poor measured result.

So you end up with a backlog of problems that could have been fixed, unhappy customers, and sparkling measures for speed of closing problem reports.

Instead try:

  • Measuring the number of problems whose root cause has been resolved.
  • Or measure the number of customers who report their problem has been solved to their satisfaction.
  • Or look for customers who have multiple open issues, or issues open for long time periods and just call them!

Question:

Is your service staff trained in following service processes or in providing service?

In my example above, at every step, people were correctly following a process, resulting in my getting more and more tortured.

Customer service people who are trained in processes often delight in not-helping customers when they confident they are correctly following the process.

This is particularly infuriating to customers who want to be made to feel like someone at your company cares about the suffering you are inflicting.

Instead try:

  • Training people on the right triggers to throw out the process
  • Then have them ask “What do you think we should do to make this better for you?”
  • And give them the ability to act.

Another idea:

Involve your customer service people in creating great service.

In the BMW example I would have each dealership manage a contest for their service team to get together and come up with three new ideas for how to provide outstanding service.  You could pay $1000 each for the best 10 ideas.

Instead of putting $10k into a survey, where you have sales and service people training the customers to give the right answers, which are of no real use to you anyway, you could be motivating Actual Service!!

The existence of the contest alone would inspire thinking about service, and you get much better ideas when you involve the people who actually do the work in coming up with the best way to improve it.

Getting it Right

Look at what you measure and then look at the dark side of it.?If you were going to game the measures to come out looking good what would you do??What non-intended result would occur?  Because it will…

People like to make customers happy.  Let them.

At the very least, if you are not serious about providing actual service, don’t torture your customers with surveys and processes that only annoy them, and give you a false sense of your greatness.

What do you think?

How have you seen customers get service really right or really wrong? Share your stories in the comment box below!

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Patty Azzarello is an executive, author, speaker and CEO-advior. She works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. Patty has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

It’s Hard to Be Irresistible When You’re Kissing Up to Folks Who Don’t Care About You

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Invest in the Customers You Want to Attract

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Dreams are good things. Strategies to get us there are essential to making those dreams real. A key strategy in any business plan is knowing who the customers are that we want to serve.

Sometimes we think we know that, but then we make decisions worrying about what the whole world of customers will think of what we do. We want the whole world to love us, even though we know we’re not building a business for the whole lot of them.

Do you see the disconnect in that?

It’s hard to be irresistible to our ideal customers when we’re not showing them they’re the only ones we care about. Yet, sometimes we change our business because worry about the opinions of folks simply because they have opinions about us and what we do.

Before we change we really ought to consider whether the the folks having opinions are part of our ideal customer group.

The strongest businesses, the best web apps, the biggest celebrities and rock stars know that serving and celebrating their loyal fans is what builds a foundational brand. As Becky McCray and Sheila Scarborough pointed out so brilliantly at SOBCon2010 — If we narrow the niche we serve, the opportunity gets wider. If we invest hugely in the people we want to attract, the attraction factor becomes huge.

If we hedge our bets, those ideal customers can tell we’re not with them 100%.

Give your listening, your love and your best work to the ones who love what you do.

Think a minute. Have you been taking time from your ideal customers to please folks who’ll never care about you?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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The Preschool Teacher and the 3 Year Old: When Customers Misbehave!

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Not a Focus Group Kid

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I’m a teacher. I love teachers. We’re all teachers in some way. So I can tell this story with friendship and compassion. Besides if you read on, you’ll see it’s not about teachers at all, but about companies and customers …

From the start we knew our son wasn’t going to be “focus group” material. He decided when to be born — and even then, the doctor had to go to extremes to convince him to join the world. (I was pretty sure he’d be driving a car out when he did.)

By 2, he could write, spell, and read, but he had no interest in conversation. He didn’t draw until he was 5. He preferred to examine the world through his own eyes and perfect his handwriting, like an athlete or a musician might — hours a day, practicing each movement until he perfected it and then practicing again. That same year, he developed an entire sign alphabet.

Let’s just say that in his preschool class, our son was a niche market. His preschool teacher, an upright authoritarian, was used to serving a one-size-fits-all market. She had her objectives, her goals, and her expectations. As you can imagine, theirs was not a relationship made in heaven.

At the first teacher-parent conference, Ms. Authority laid it all out for me exactly what my son was doing wrong. I heard a short litany of complaints about this young customer misbehaving.

Of course, the problems were all his.

  1. He doesn’t pay attention. “I work hard everyday planning magnificent lessons around fans and feathers,” she said. ” … so that he can learn the letter f,” she went on. “He ignores what we’re doing and walks over to the magnifying glass. He looks at wheels on toy trucks and spines on books.”
  2. He’s defiant. “When I tell him to sit in the time out chair, he defies me. He outright asks what will happen if he doesn’t sit there!”
  3. He’s got a hearing defect and could be deaf. “No matter how loud I talk, he doesn’t pay attention. You need to have him tested. I think he might be deaf.” (I’m not making this up.)

Except, I knew the problems weren’t problems at all. It was all I could do explain that to her. You see, this customer was ignoring her because she had nothing to offer.

  1. He already knew how to read, write and spell. Had she let him near the magnetic letters he would have written out words like “cough” and “pharmacy.”
  2. He’s curious and careful, not defiant. Had she gotten to know him, she would have found out that he can’t make a decision without knowing where it would lead.
  3. It wasn’t his hearing. Had she walked up behind him to whisper “chocolate cake,” she might have seen how well he listened to important words.

Instead, she was the center of her universe. She saw her customer through a filter of expectations. The data set said his behavior was not right and she filled in an explanation.

She had made the offer about HER … not about him.

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With the right offer to the same customer — say a magnifying glass and a set of magnetic letters — she might have made a loyal fan who would be looking for what she was going to bring out next for him.

We do the same thing in business, we design something that we’re sure the perfect customers will love, but sometimes we forget to ask them what thrills them.

What do you advise when someone complains about customers misbehaving?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

I’m a proud affiliate of

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