Great quote on listening to customers from Paul Hagan at 1 to 1 Media.  Its a little dense, but worth sinking your teeth into:

Think of customer experience efforts as a continuous improvement effort, not a metric to achieve. A customer listening program shouldn’t be a goal unto itself to help a firm benchmark against competition or achieve some score. Rather, it’s a set of signals that can either point to areas of dysfunction or of excellence in the ecosystem that delivers the experiences that customers have. Firms that excel at customer experience make a discipline out of digging deeper around these signals to understand the root cause (wherever it exists) and create a governance mechanism to drive actions across the company. In the case of dysfunction, the signals can point to poor processes, miscommunications, misguided policies, or in this case selling to the wrong kinds of customers. In the case of excellence, the signals represent opportunities to replicate activities that drive value–sometimes done by employees who don’t even realize what they’re doing is exceptional because they do it naturally or that the company doesn’t realize is important to customers.

ARMA has a few customer service gems from around the web to give you before the weekend:

John Jantsch reminds us of ways to turn “transactions into referrals,” i.e. elevating mundane customer experiences into something that makes them recommend your product or service to others.  One way that we liked:

Over deliver and surprise your new customers with something they didn’t expect. People love good surprises and few things get people talking faster than something they didn’t expect. Lots of people get this idea, but also don’t forget your long time customers. Sometimes in the rush to get new customers we forget about the ones that got us here. I remember a few years ago I brought out a new product and offered a special deal in a promotion. I had a few customers that had paid full price prior to the promotion. I went back and offered them the discount and I’ve since lost count of how many customers one of those recipients has referred.

At Church of the Customer, Jackie Hugh explores what she refers to as “monster loyalty,” building on her idea of “one-percenters” which is also quite interesting. Click through to read about the way that “the most highly engaged particpants in a community make up a tiny percentage of the overall customer base but are vocal passionate evangelists who bring new customers into the fold through word of mouth.”

And then Amie Marse has some pointers stemming from Yahoo’s recent customer service faux paus.  Here, she talks about how she believes in focusing on the details:

When a customer has an issue, they don’t care about your marketing strategy, apologies or about how great your brand is. They simply want the issue fixed. When you rectify a negative situation, the customer remembers the good experience and will do business with you again.