At ARMA, if something doesn’t work, we always strive to acknowledge the problem and fix it.  Two posts this week caught our eye by looking critically at how to get back on your feet in the face of service failure or even perceived service failure.

Jeanne Bliss at Small Business Trends wrote about Griffin Hospital, a Connecticut health care provider that flipped its customer ratings from abysmal to top marks.  (In short, its about likeability.)  Read her post to see how they transformed the “emotional journey of going to the hospital begins in the parking lot” and the effect it had on their customers’ experience.

Lori at Who’s Your Gladys? tackled the issue from the perspective of businesses that may or may not agree with their customers’ negative experiences with them, but with tips on how to rise above the experience and improve the customer interaction regardless.  Try putting a few of her zen tricks in your toolbox the next time you have a hard time with a client or customer.  This isn’t just mindfulness though, try out this exercise:

Challenge yourself (or your team) to always, no exceptions, respond to all of a difficult customer’s requests with enthusiasm and the highest levels of professionalism.

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Hopefully, October is treating you well so far.  Here are two posts on customer service that recently spoke to us.

The first is from a post Andy Beal put up last week at OPEN Forum where he offered up four tips on improving customer service.  Some of the tips are pretty straightforward, but he gives concrete examples of how to put them into practice.  His fourth tip though, really is worth emphasizing.  He encourages us to set up feedback loops to facilitate more customer service concerns from the middle of the range, not just significant complaints or high praise:

There are many more [customers] that don’t speak up, despite their experience with your business being merely “meh.” Those are the ones you need to encourage to provide feedback.

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Yesterday’s article by Frank Eliason about the power of customer service (particularly in relation to social media) seemed particularly meaningful to us in light of Andy Beal’s thoughts regarding feedback.  Eliason is pretty clear:  “Companies must care. New metrics must surface that place the customer back in customer service.”  At ARMA, we’ve been spending more time developing our Twitter presence and Facebook page in the hopes that they will be avenues for your feedback and increased customer service.  We’d love to connect with you there too.  And if you have an issue or a concern, we’re committed to seeing it through.

What are ways that you prioritize customer feedback?

In essence, you want to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What would your customers want to hear from you when they contact you with any type of issue?

Christopher Elliot who writes on customer service issues for BNet.com has the following article: “5 Simple Things to Say to Win Over a Customer.” Elliot counsels businesses to start with a personal greeting (how many times are customers greeted with a phone tree and a request for information instead?). Then he suggests these steps:

• Asking “How may I help you?”
• Remaining with the customer until the issue is fixed
• Providing contact information
• Ending by thanking the customer for his/her business.

Clearly, these are basic yet crucial steps, which help the customer feel that his/her issue is being taken seriously and being resolved, and also that he/she is important to your business.

Another exercise is to think, again as if you are the customer, what you would not want to hear. Examples of what customers don’t want to hear are: excuses, “that’s not our problem,”  “we can’t/won’t help you,” or “call later.”

• How important is customer service to your organization?
• How do you want customers to feel when dealing with your company?
• What is the perfect customer service interaction?
• What type of customer service experience do you want to create (friendly, efficient, quick, in depth)?

Once you have decided what your customer philosophy is, you can go create policies to enforce your views.

John Foley has written a great article on AllBusiness entitled: Customer Service: More Than Just Icing on a Cake. In it he provided ten tips to perfect customer service. The first two are:

1. Define how you view customer service: Is the customer always right? Is the customer entitled to equal compensation? Is the customer contacted by management on every complaint? These are important steps to define.

2. Outline a customer service policy based on how you as an owner perceive customer service. Make sure the outline is based on common sense. If the customer is upset, make them happy. When little Jimmy cries, Mommy does anything to make him stop. The same holds true with customers.

Having guiding principles and policies will ensure that your customers know where they stand and where you stand in relation to their needs.

What are great customer service must-haves? The answer lies in what we dislike about bad customer service. That is the first must-have of great customer service is responding to the customer. Seems obvious, but yet, how many times have you been on hold for 30 minutes or tried to get a salesperson to pay attention to you?

• The best employees: We’ve discussed it here before, and hiring the appropriate people is a must-have.
• Efficiency.
• Truthfulness. Many times service reps exaggerate because they think that is what customers want to hear, but customers would rather know the truth. If it is going to take 48 hours, then say so. If the price is wrong, admit it.

The Wichita Eagle (Kansas) provides these must-haves  in the article The keys to customer service:

• Reliability.
• Responsiveness.
• Empathy.

Great customer service stands apart and in order to do so, it has to have a standard to live up to. Being reliable, responsive, empathic, truthful  and efficient should definitely make a difference.

In the blog post “How Long is Too Long to Wait For Customer Service” (from where the statistics above came) the following observation is made:

But, keep in mind that speed of service does not mean the actual interaction is helpful. Once the call or email has been received, customers are more interested in having their issues resolved rather than a quick response.

Companies have to be mindful of how long customers are waiting for service, but also that they are helping customers. It would be just as counterproductive to have many inexperienced agents to deal with customers immediately, but who can’t provide assistance or information.

Recently, we tried contacting a company about a discontinued product. We were told that the warehouses would be searched and that we would receive a response in two weeks if the product was not available. If it was available, it would be shipped out right away. Nearly two weeks went by with absolutely not one word from the company. A call was placed to the 800-number, and we were forced to hold 20 minutes to speak to a representative. She informed us that since our two weeks were not quite up, we called them before they could call us. Product was not available.  This company failed in so many ways–it made us wait on hold. It set an arbitrary time frame to respond to us when they could have easily sent an email when they discovered the product was not available. Why make customers wait for a response for two weeks?

Organizations or companies that deal with the public need to set an acceptable amount of wait time, and cap it. It is not acceptable to have customers holding for more than x minutes. Replies must be done in no more than x days. Companies should remember (unlike the company referenced above) that a cap time is just a maximum–you can and should answer in less time if you can.

Imagine you call a company, and the person who helps you has to tell you that what you need can’t be done. This person talks in a monotone, and seems disinterested and uncaring. Imagine the same scenario with someone who is truly apologetic and concerned. Which situation will seem bad and which will seem bearable?

Of course, personality will not compensate for inefficiency or lack of knowledge. You can be very sunny and helpful, but if you take a long time to get things done or just don’t have answers to basic questions, the customer will be put off.

Hiring people with the right personality is crucial to your customer service efforts. Personalities should match your corporate culture, however. You can’t have a really laid back personality at a high-stakes financial firm for instance. Your customers will expect to deal with someone who respects time constraints. Similarly, if you run a funeral home, you may not want a chirpy person to answer the phone. That would be jarring.

A good personality will help your customer service representatives to deal with the sometimes difficult situations that arise in the field. Personality does go a long way in resolving conflict and making things seem better.

1. Can’t get a human on the phone
2. Salesperson is rude
3. Many phone steps needed
4. Long wait on hold
5. Unhelpful solution
6. Salesperson is too pushy
7. Extras are pitched
8. No apology for unsolved problem
9. Can’t find store salesperson
10. Boring hold music or messages
11. Wait at counter or checkout
12. Wait for scheduled repairer

To learn from this, let’s see what are the common themes:

• Lack of respect for the customer’s time
• Rudeness
• Incompetence

Time and again, companies fail to see their service from the customer’s perspective. Customers do not want to wait for service, and when they do get service, they want that service to be efficient. It is really that simple. Again, the solution is obvious: make sure you have sufficient and well trained customer service staff. If you don’t have enough people for the amount of business you generate, you will have wait times. If you have poorly trained staff, you will provide poor or inefficient service.

Mark Hare, writing in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, says “Customer service is not what it once was.” Sadly this is true. Hare states the following:

We’ve all come to expect such breakdowns — as we are forced to deal with electronic systems that have replaced human contact.

There are reasons for the decline in customer service, most of them connected to cost-cutting. People have endured faulty products and bad service since human beings began selling to each other.

But there is something disconcerting, even dehumanizing, in navigating an e-maze of procedures and rules that make no sense, explained by nameless service reps far away — people with neither the authority nor the knowledge to solve a problem. They merely repeat what the computer screen tells them to say, again and again, until the customer complies or gives up.

Hare provides examples from his own dealings with companies (airlines, car companies, etc.) where a breakdown occurs. He concludes the following:

The problem isn’t a lack of friendliness; it’s the incompetence and indifference of companies whose decision-makers live far from us. In the end, customers are powerless to get answers, let alone, satisfaction. I can’t believe in the long run that any of this is good for business. It certainly is not good for the human spirit.

Customer service is incredibly important to a business and its bottom line. Complaints such as this provide a way to try to fix these breakdowns, by recognizing what is going wrong.

To summarize Hare’s points, in actionable bits, customer service suffers/is bad because of:

• Lack of human contact
• Illogical electronic systems
• Distance from the customer
• Reps with no authority or knowledge
• Incompetent personnel
• Cost-cutting in customer service
• Indifferent companies
• Making customers feel powerless

These are all big issues…and some are systemic. If a company is indifferent–doesn’t care about its customers–there is little that can be done to change it. Personnel can be replaced and electronic systems changed.

The key is to make customer service a priority. Listening to feedback would go a long way in preventing the decline Mark Hare discusses.

Can you increase your likability? Can you teach likability? Not quite, but you can increase your awareness of its importance. In his book Enchantment, Guy Kawasaki preaches increasing your likability if you want to do well in business. One of the ways is to have a genuine smile. Again, smiling is a natural act and if it does not come naturally to you, you won’t appear likable.

We have discussed it before here on ARMA’s blog: hiring the right people for customer service is crucial. Make sure to hire likable people, who do have genuine smiles. People who are not likable will aggravate your customers and make things rough when they don’t need to be.

How do you assess likability? It is obviously subjective, but a person who appears happy, smiles a lot, and is enthusiastic about his or her job is closer to being likable than someone who complains about his or her situation, and does not smile a whole lot.   Certainly, there are personality tests that measure contentment, optimism and other measures of likability.

Likability should be a key attribute for any customer service professional.