Category Archives for "customer service"

Thank you Tech Support

By John Aberle | Blogging , customer service

I love working with other professionals who have skills and knowledge I don’t have. This post is a thank you to four talented people who pulled my blogging bacon out of the fire.

I’ve been tied up for a few days now trying to correct the fact that my blog’s front page would not redirect to the full page article. I thought the problem was due to having tried to do a backup and having it lock up on me. So I loaded an old back up on an alternate domain name on my other hosting account, HostGator.

There were technical challenges with the restore. Continue reading

Losing Customer Loyalty Is Often from Little Things Adding Up

By John Aberle | customer service , heart-centered

If you think customers don’t care about how you treat them and your employees, think again. Yesterday, as I went on my walk, I came to the point where I normally stop for iced tea. For the maybe the sixth time in 15 years, I went to Burger King. I stopped going to Burger King because they used the concentrated iced tea instead of fresh brewed. Several months ago, I heard that the one near us now uses fresh brewed. I hadn’t tried them until today. And I changed because my favorite stop for iced tea, and sometimes breakfast, finally lost my loyalty.

As I have bought $6 to $10 per week, and I’ve been a loyal customer for a minimum of three years, that’s $312 to $520 per year or a lifetime value of at least $1,500.

Destroying a customer’s loyalty is often due to a lot of little things

So what finally broke my feeling of customer loyalty? Actually, there have been a lot of things that all added up over time. For instance, this restaurant didn’t heat the facility on cold days. As most of the time when I stopped, I used the drive through, it didn’t affect me often. However, I would watch the employees, who became friends because of how well they treated me, shiver and complain about how cold it was in there. I too hated it on the occasions I did go inside, like for breakfast, and had to bundle up in order to stand the humid cold.

I watched the franchisee blow off one manager who’d worked her heart out for them a year or so ago. I cringed at this cavalier treatment of someone who was good with her employees and who demonstrably cared about her customers.

Then recently I learned that the second manager I’d come to really like after a series of short term ones, was demoted. She got fed up shortly after that because of how the new manager treated her and left. Morale with the other employees has dropped too. It’s hard to get a willing smile out of them. Interestingly, the reason for the demotion is that the franchise requires the manager to have gone through training so the owner hired a man who has the certification.

As a small business consultant, I’m a big believer in training and certifications. So on the surface, you would expect me to agree with this policy. Continue reading

The Way to Win a Customer's Repeat Business

By John Aberle | customer service , Sales and Marketing , Soft Sell

One would think that the way to win a customer's repeat business is intuitively obvious. For instance, at the January 8, 2008 Pasadena Art of Small Business Survival workshop, Glenn Rowe broke the audience into five groups to discuss customer satisfaction. 

Business owners and managers often seem to forget what it's like to be a customer

The fascinating thing to me was that everyone seemed to agree on what makes up good customer service as well as what bad service looks and feels like. Excellent customer service is intuitively obvious to virtually everyone – when they are customers. Often, though, business owners and managers seem to forget everything they know when they are now responsible for profits and efficiency.

Use heart-centered, soft sell approach to resolve problems with customers

The wonderful thing about heart-centered, soft sell sales and marketing is that they naturally focus on what needs to be done to give customers exceptional service. Your attention simply needs to be on what your customer really wants and needs. When it comes to bad service, faulty products or missed delivery dates, the customer first wants someone to care. You show this by listening, asking questions to understand, and doing something to repair the situation.

This example shows how important it is to follow up with an upset customer

In a Yelp.com review of Slater’s 50/50, David L. revealed how Scott Slater handled an earlier negative review he gave Slater’s 50/50. When he read David L’s December 20, 2009 review, Slater took responsibility to discuss the problem. As a result, on December 26th, this same customer wrote another review, this time giving Slater’s four stars (out of five possible) and retracting his last one, all because “Mr. Scott Slater himself messaged me with my concerns and addressed them accordingly.  With that alone made me want to come back and try their food again.  Which I did.. a few days ago.”

By showing you care, you win back an upset customer as a loyal fan

Whether you apply a heart-centered, soft sell approach or not to your sales and marketing, the way to win a customers’ repeat business is to ensure an exceptional experience. Surprisingly, just like Scott Slater did with his Slater’s 50/50 customer, you can turn a negative experience into a positive by fixing the problem as best as possible as quickly as possible. Excellent customer service means using empathy and listening closely, asking questions as needed to learn what this negative experience means to them – and how can you make them happier? Finally, take action.

Take time today to say thank you to someone who’s provided you exceptional service.

 

Customer Service Metrics Can Do More Harm than Good

By John Aberle | customer service , heart-centered , Sales and Marketing , Soft Sell

Cable Internet Installation Leads to Distrust of Customer Service Metrics

After our recent switch from DSL to cable service for Internet, I feel a kinship with Charles H. Green’s comments in “Killing Trust with Measurements and Rewards,” in Trust-Based Selling. Green describes how the pharmaceutical industry has been increasing sales representatives while their effectiveness keeps dropping.

Among the problems they have is that as their sales force gets younger and younger, the expertise of their representatives declines. Doctors are seeing these representatives as “pill pushers” rather than as knowledgeable advisors and consultants. Why should they bother wasting precious time they could spend with patients to see salespeople who only care about their own metrics, i.e. how many scripts are written for their products. This is definitely a hard sell approach to sales.

Soft Sell Approach Requires Concern on Getting Right Solution for Client

Continue reading

Customer Service Lessons Learned from Installing Plugins

By John Aberle | Blogging , customer service

I know that this sounds like a simple, silly thing to someone who’s a code jockey or programmer or even just really technically knowledgeable about WordPress. Nevertheless, because I’m a blogger who is only slightly knowledgeable, I have spent days in frustration over plugins. I would upload them to my blog site but they never appeared on my plugins page so I could activate them. Finally, it dawned on me what the problem might be – and I just confirmed I was right.

After I downloaded a plugin to my computer, I would click on it to extract it to a folder. What happened with most of them is that they created another folder or they were already in a folder. My installation instructions would say to upload the folder to the blog’s wp-content/plugin folder so I would. Then I would go to my Site Admin and select Plugins, but when I went down to the available but not activated plugins I wouldn’t find the ones I uploaded. Yesterday I realized it was because the plugin folder had another folder in it instead of the files that WordPress was expecting, so they couldn’t show up. When I moved the files up so there was only one folder, the plugins showed up.

This issue goes to the whole concept of customer service. All of us make the same kind of errors. It’s actually a form of blindness because we can’t see the assumptions we take for granted, the steps we are not even conscious of taking because they are so automatic.

What procedures do you have that are frustrating your customers? These are the things that destroy loyalty. On February 1st, I wrote about building customers by word-of-mouth in “The Best Marketing Is Word-of-Mouth.” It takes a positive, exciting customer experience to draw people to you. A negative experience creates word-of-mouth stories that drive people away. What can you fix in your products or services that will remove something annoying your customers so that they can enjoy their customer experience with you more?