4 Action Items for More Lucrative Customer Communication
After spending 4 hours on the phone with 4 different Verizon tech support people over a 7.5 hour period, I’m compelled to write about the sheer power that quality customer service can play in retaining customers.
This won’t be a rant – I’m floored by the quality of communication I received from Verizon tech support, which was nothing like the ‘Internet Help Desk’ video that I linked to in a post several weeks ago.
Why This Matters to You
As a small business owner or solo entrepreneur, it’s almost impossible to compete with the big guys in terms of pricing, availability, functionality, etc. In his post “6 Steps To Layout Out Your Competitive Strategy,” Timothy suggests that in order to become a contender in your industry, you first ask yourself, “What does my company do better than anyone else?”
And while just starting out you may not be able to call yourself “better” than your competition on many points, you can quickly become better than every other company in the industry in terms of customer interaction.
Not only does improving your customer interaction cost virtually nothing, but it is perhaps the one area in which it is easiest to beat your big competitors. Ironically, quality customer service is the one factor that is generally most important to customers.
4 Lessons Learned from Verizon Customer Service You Can Implement Immediately to Start Giving Better Customer Service
Because I was once the operations manager for a customer service department and a sales trainer for a big call center, I tend to reverse engineer the tactics of a phone rep whenever I call a company. Verizon (at least the DSL installation department) has obviously spent huge sums of money and invested a great deal of time in training their employees. Here’s a free 30 second summary of key points that I gathered over my 4 hours on the phone with Verizon:
1. Verbally re-state the problem to make sure that you understand it correctly
Whenever someone on the phone asks, “how can I help you,” I inevitably go into way too much detail that has absolutely nothing to do with the real problem. Until you pinpoint the real problem, you’ll just be wasting your time and theirs. Each time I called, the Verizon tech support folks would make it a point to first ask if they understood my problem correctly before they tried to fix it.
2. Continuously verbalize that you’re moving toward a productive resolution
Obviously we were experiencing some difficulty getting the DSL to work, but each tech support rep that I talked to made it a habit of regularly making statements like “that’s a good sign,” or “looks like we’re going to be able to get this going with a few more tests” each time they got a positive response to a question about how thing were performing in my end. Think about it – they could have just said “ok” or “thanks” or said nothing in response. I can’t tell you how much these positive reactions to little victories impacted my mood. Throughout the 7 hour period, I could feel tension swelling and each time I received reassurance that we were moving in the right direction I could feel that tension flood out of my body immediately.
3. Let customers flip out without taking it personally
I consider myself a pretty level headed person, but after 7 fruitless hours of trying to connect to the internet, I finally lost it with the tech support guy. “Please!” I said,
This is ridiculous! It’s been 7 hours now and I’m still not online! Can you put someone else on the phone or ask someone for some advice – not that I don’t think you know what you’re doing, but maybe someone else can offer a different perspective! Just do something!
This very nice person allowed me to finish my rant, even pausing after I stopped to make sure I was done. He then apologized sincerely for the inconvenience and then addressed the point in my rant by asking me if he would mind being placed on hold so that he could ask a mentor some questions. Wow!
4. Confirm that the problem was solved before hanging up
Many places will say “is there anything else I can help you with?” before hanging up. But what struck me with Verizon is that throughout the many weeks that I have dealt with them on the phone for various reasons, they always end the conversation by restating my original problem (see point #1) and then confirming that it has been solved. This way, I don’t hang up after being sidetracked only to find that I never did fix the problem about which I called.
Service Untitled asks a good question, Is Customer Service Cultural? Maybe, but it doesn’t have to be. The people I talked to were in located in the US, the Philippines, and in India. Good, consistent customer service starts with a series of well defined processes.
Most people think of customer service as an afterthought, but there really is a science to the entire process and much to learn. C. B. Whittemore from Flooring the Consumer offers a wealth of resources in her post “Don’t Compete on Price.”
There is an endless amount to be learned about this very valuable yet undervalued piece of business. The Del Mar College Small Business Development Center says that customer service should be part of a company’s marketing plan.
At some point, I was thinking about dumping Verizon. But now knowing that they will actually listen to my problem and then work to solve it makes me want to stick around. So I’m sticking with Verizo and will pay them thousands of dollars over the next several years while I live here - perhaps throughout my life.
What do you think?
How important is customer interaction in your business? Have you had a great or horrendous experience with a company? What specific processes do you use to ensure that your customers enjoy working with you?
After reading the first sentence I was completely expecting a very cynical article on customer service! Halfway through I stopped and started over to read it again with a different mindset
I’m not an entrepreneur (yet), but customer service is very important in the company I work for. It’s a high-tech business to business company that supplies key-components for our customer’s applications. But to be honest our CS is not that good, the effort is there, but at the same time there’s this cultural attitude that “We are the best” and “They have no choice anyway, what are they gonna do? Redesign their application (hahaha)”
Obviously that doesn’t work well. Glad you had a different experience.
i was thinking the same thing as soon as i saw verizon. i just saw a report that basically said that everyone with a cell phone (read:everyone with a pulse) was unhappy with their provider. it even talked about how sprint had ‘discontinued service’ to customers who had called their service support more than a certain number of times. what was sprint’s reaction? (i’m condensing this) ‘considering how many times they have contacted customer service, we feel they will be happier with another provider.’ i, for one, am shocked that this behavior by a company to it’s clients is acceptable. i don’t use sprint now and as long as i have a cell phone, i never will. customer service, to me, is not one part of my company to focus on at certain times. it is everything. not only to keep the ones you currently have, but to get the ones who’ve never heard of you yet. i love this topic; thanks for bringing it around again.
i just remembered that i heard the report on NPR yesterday afternoon. you can probably find it there, if you’re interested.
Christine, Thank you for the nice mention of Flooring The Consumer and for the terrific writeup on how powerful and effective good customer service is!
FYI - The 6 steps link seems to be down.
Very Timely post. I had a similar problem with Dell phone support. It reemphasizes the great need to have awesome customer service, especially if the only other interaction your customers have with you is the web. The internet is awesome but it is not necessarily personal. Its the combo of High Tech and High Touch that will bring you business in any field.
I can see why you would think that! Most any post about customer service is likely to be a rant. I’ve worked with companies like the one you describe… they say CS is important, but they don’t back it up with action. The “they have no choice” attitude works for a while… until the customers DO have a choice and then the result can be a bit of a “shock.” Thanks for sharing!
That really is unbelievable isn’t it! Instead of thinking… we may have a problem that needs to be fixed, the company just gets rid of those with the biggest problem! ouch.
I’m a huge fan of NPR - thanks Erin!
You bet C.B. Thanks for providing a great post to link to!
Thanks Happy - I tried it and it seemed to work this time… thanks for the heads up!
That’s a great point Noah. For an online company where the only human interaction is usually customer service or tech support, the issue if fantastic service becomes even more critical…
The six steps article is working now. A very nice read. I am in the middle of a strategic management MBA course so most of that stuff is very familiar.
Personally, I would love to see some strategic guidelines for website/blogs, I haven’t really seen that out there.
Interesting idea Happy… what specifically would you expect to see covered a strategic guideline for blogs/websites?
thats what we call good customer experience. The better is is, the more sales you get generally.
My approach on this is by keep everything simple yet comprehensive. Everything must be properly define.
Put ourself in our customer shoes, and from there we’ll see what customer see.
I suspect similar to the 6 steps article, but really geared towards bloggers.
I know I don’t have the experience to lay it out, but things like what the challenges are working in the rapidly changing web environment. What the current and future prospects are for your niche.
Things like accessing you blog competitors stregnths(dpeth of content vs amount of content, length of existence, writing style, site design, brand, etc)
How to lay out your strengths, and then how to use them for competitive advantage.
If you have the contacts or knowledge ot generate that e-book, I think it would be a huge winner. I would attempt it myself, but I wouldn’t have near enough time to embark on something with that type of scale until my MBA is over in 6 months or so.
Those are all really fantastic questions that deserve an answer. We are attempting to tackle something similar in the near future.
I talk to at least one business owner every week who has spent or is considering spending a good deal of money on building a blog without addressing any of these questions - not they aren’t trying to think the idea through completely - they just don’t know to ask these questions.
As a blogger, you have an idea about some of the challenges. It pains me to see businesses dumping money and time into building a blog that won’t work for them because they haven’t planned correctly or because they don’t understand how blogs are different from websites. I remember thinking the same way not all that long ago.
BTW - congrats on the near completion of your MBA - what an accomplishment!
It sounds so simple doesn’t it Zaki! Putting ourselves in our customer’s shoes and we would know what it takes to deliver great customer service. I think the problem occurs when no one “owns” the responsibility of the customer’s happiness. In which case, an effective solution is like you say, a properly defined process.
Thanks Zaki!