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.

Two posts about customer service caught our eye here at ARMA today:

Susan Payton at Small Biz Trends emphasizes the importance of maintaining the human element in your customer actions, no matter how much you want to stick to the script.  Her suggestions are essential, but easily overlooked.  Like this one:

Move away from stressing the importance of your call-time numbers to save money and instead focus on the bigger, better picture: How many calls are you getting with customer issues? How can you reduce that? How many satisfied customers do you have?

Marilyn at Who’s Your Gladys? also reminds us of customer service pitfalls, like forgetting to praise staff when things are going well:

Mistake 2: Be silent when things are running smoothly.

It isn’t always easy to manage a service staff, especially when times are tough.  It makes sense to speak up when problems arise to ensure things get back on track. But what do you say when your staff is working hard and things are coasting along as planned? Many managers consider that “business as usual” and make the mistake of saying nothing.

If you’ve read any great customer service tips lately please feel free to leave them in the comments!

This infographic tackles some of the everyday realities of poor customer service and the effect it can have on your small business:

Cynthia Clark at 1to1 Media shared a notable story about the value of extending customer service after the sale or the end of your service:

A few years ago my husband splurged on a winter coat from the British brand. The coat is still in a very good shape, but he recently lost one of the buttons. Since the buttons have the company logo engraved on them, I wanted to try and find exact replacements. So last month I emailed the company’s customer service department to ask whether they had any replacement buttons for sale. A couple of days later I received a reply saying that Burberry offered a replacement button service. Although I was informed that this was limited to Burberry trench coats, I took a chance and sent a photo of the button I needed just in case they were similar.

I was in luck. Burberry responded, saying that they were sending me two replacement buttons, which came in handy as my husband has since lost a second button. Not only did they not charge me for them, but the packaged was shipped overnight.

How does this apply to non-retail businesses?  What are the ways that you can increase your customer service after provision of a service or consultation?  Think about the possible answers here, because they are the success to loyal customers both at the individual level and the government level.

ARMA believes strongly in the quality of our service long after we’ve left the building and you should too.

ARMA believes strongly in the importance of customer service, and values Who’s Your Gladys? for their consistent high quality of writing and their emphasis on providing concrete tools to improving customer service best practices.  Their most recent article is no exception.  This excerpt frames the first of three suggestions they have on shifting your customer service approach:

Tip 1: Frame Every Problem with a Solutions-Focus … With this focus, problems become so big, that the prize is diminished. Do customer service problems ever overwhelm you? When you focus on solutions it’s much easier to find them. The best way to find solutions is to get curious. Curiosity lights up the creative centers of your brain, and puts your body in a calmer, more resourceful state.