Crack the Customer Code

Changing your brand identity? You’re not alone. Jeannie and Adam tackle how to identify when the time is right to rebrand, but watch out! This week they're taking on a customer zero.

Evolution vs. Revolution

Jeannie and Adam have noticed a trend. When companies rebrand, they often imply that this indicates an evolution in their customer experience as well.

Changing the logo of your company is a useful, sometimes necessary move—a reflection of research in usability or color studies, an evolution in brand identity, etc. However, rebranding does not automatically solve ingrained customer service issues.

How can marketers invest more time and resources in customer service and identify when it’s an appropriate time to rebrand?

Related Content

Jeannie's Blog post, Customer Experience Isn't Marketing 

Sponsor Message

Customer Experience is hot… but are you taking advantage of its huge potential to make your services business more prominent and profitable? Join Service Strategies for an informative Customer Experience Workshop in San Diego on October 27th. You’ll learn how to create customer success while generating profitable revenue for your services business. The workshop is part of the Service Industry Summit event, which bring together leaders from companies like Cisco, Dell and others to discuss the challenges of a changing service landscape. Visit servicestrategies.com to learn more.

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

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Marilyn Suttle is an expert on customer service culture change and developing emotional intelligence to foster breakthrough success. Her book, Who’s Your Gladys, reveals key methods to change the psychology around handling difficult customers.

What's a Gladys?

A Gladys is a demanding customer who has high expectations and may pose a challenge for you or your team. Despite these potential difficulties, these customers can give valuable feedback or illuminate aspects of your service that may need to be revamped.

We've all encountered a Gladys at one point or another, and the situation can be emotional. After all, your company is your baby and criticism can be difficult to hear. How can you and your team take in the experience in a constructive way?

Marilyn suggests reminding yourself that hearing criticism is a necessary part of customer resolution. Examine the psychology of the situation. What triggers does this Gladys present that bother your team? Do they appear to be demanding or cold? Recognizing the judgment allows you to find the compassion in the situation. Instead of cold, a customer may simply be slow to warm up. Therefore the tactic to communicate with them changes.

Marilyn and her co-author, Lori Jo Vest detail more triggers and customer service solutions in Who's Your Gladys? and their upcoming book, Taming Gladys: How To Tame Your Most Difficult Gladys.

And as a special offer, they're giving a bonus gift to today's listeners. Tune in to the episode to find out more!

About Marilyn Suttle

Marilyn Suttle has an incredible track record. She is the President of Suttle Enterprises, a bestselling author and keynote speaker, and a Human Potential Expert, enhancing leadership and social interaction within business teams. She trains and consults for Fortune 500 companies, entrepreneurs, and universities and manages emotional and professional development. She has been featured in The U.S. News & World Report, Ladies Home Journal, and Inc. Magazine. She joins the podcast today to share her expertise on turning upset customers into loyal fans.

Connect with Marilyn

LinkedInTwitterFacebookwww.MarilynSuttle.comwww.whosyourgladys.com

Related Content

Marilyn's book, Who's Your Gladys? How To Turn Even The Most Difficult Customer into Your Biggest FanA bonus gift for our listeners, www.whosyourgladys.com/bonus_gift

Sponsor Message

Customer Experience is hot… but are you taking advantage of its huge potential to make your services business more prominent and profitable? Join Service Strategies for an informative Customer Experience Workshop in San Diego on October 27th. You’ll learn how to create customer success while generating profitable revenue for your services business. The workshop is part of the Service Industry Summit event, which bring together leaders from companies like Cisco, Dell and others to discuss the challenges of a changing service landscape. Visit servicestrategies.com to learn more.

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Intelligent and compassionate entrepreneurs often get caught in the magical world of the ideal customer experience. But what happens when things go wrong? Join Adam and Jeannie as they discuss how to be prepared for worst case customer scenarios.

You’ve created the ideal customer experience, your business is ready to roll. Suddenly something happens: your technology fails, a child gets lost in your store, someone vomits on your roller coaster.

Do you have a plan? What do you spend your time and resources preparing for? It sounds like a deceptively simple issue, but dealing with worst case customer scenarios gracefully is essential for a successful business model. After all, according to the Peak and End Rule, if a customer's last memory of your service is a bad one, they probably won't return.

If you’re concerned with high probability and high impact issues, this is the podcast episode for you. Join Adam and Jeannie as they take on customer experience and worst case customer scenarios to find out how you can “create fewer ruined days for your customers.”

Customer Experience is hot… but are you taking advantage of its huge potential to make your services business more prominent and profitable? Join Service Strategies for an informative Customer Experience Workshop in San Diego on October 27th. You’ll learn how to create customer success while generating profitable revenue for your services business. The workshop is part of the Service Industry Summit event, which bring together leaders from companies like Cisco, Dell and others to discuss the challenges of a changing service landscape. Visit servicestrategies.com to learn more.

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

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Inadequate customer service keeps rearing it’s ugly head. The good news is that any company of any size can do something immediate to make their service better. Enter Peter Shankman, the New York Times dubbed “PR all star”, to discuss how being super-excellent may be as easy as “being a little better sometimes”.

Peter attributes his success to “trying to be nice”. In today’s customer service economy, many people expect to be treated “like crap”. Since customer experience is trending as the main thing driving revenue, ensuring that your customers truly feel like they are a part of the company and taken care of must be a driving goal.

Peter’s latest book, Zombie Loyalists takes this idea and runs with it. A zombie loyalist is someone who is in love with your product and who drives much of your business by fighting for your brand. By consciously creating a single positive experience for that customer, you have created a loyalist. They will stick with your brand and fight to refer you, bringing their friends along with them. And since customer service tends to be so bad that consumers expect poor service, the simple act of treating people “a little better than normal” can go a long way.

As Peter points out, customers generally don’t mind when a company screws up, they mind when the company doesn’t respond to fix the problem.

"The only thing that’s worse than a hater is someone who used to be a lover”, says Peter, so ensure that your customers stay loyal by treating them right. After all, it’s nice to be nice—and it's nice to be able to pay the mortgage.

Looking for easy, actionable tips on how to maintain your customers’ loyalty and create a brand that people will love? Tune in!

Peter Shankman is a worldwide connector, presenting radical new ways of customer service thinking. He is a corporate and conference keynote speaker, a consultant for a number of Fortune 100 companies, an Adjunct Professor of Public Relations at New York University, and an author of four books. In his spare time Peter runs a series of business masterminds (not to mention marathons and triathlons).

He was one of the founders of the AOL Newsroom and Help A Reporter Out (HARO) and has been dubbed by the New York Times as the “public relations all star on everything about new media”. Peter has been featured on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and The Wall Street Journal. As if that wasn’t enough, he also advises NASA.

Customer Experience is hot… but are you taking advantage of its huge potential to make your services business more prominent and profitable? Join Service Strategies for an informative Customer Experience Workshop in San Diego on October 27th. You’ll learn how to create customer success while generating profitable revenue for your services business. The workshop is part of the Service Industry Summit event, which bring together leaders from companies like Cisco, Dell and others to discuss the challenges of a changing service landscape. Visit servicestrategies.com to learn more.

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

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Job seeking is a necessary process that we've all experienced but is there anything that can relieve the stress or helplessness of submitting your resume, as Jeannie puts it, “into the black void of eternity”? 

With mobile marketplaces taking over a significant portion of the job market, the short answer is, yes.

Today on the podcast we have an innovative Customer Hero, an app called Jobr. Jobr is based on the Tinder model of swiping left or right, and connects potential talent with employers seeking to build their company culture with like-minded, qualified individuals.

The innovation of Tinder and other similar models is gaining footing in the mobile marketplace, especially with qualified millennials seeking employment.

The way in which employers attract talent has a huge impact on recruitment methods and HR, and thus, on the type of talent that responds and business leaders are seeking talented employees who will deliver on their enterprise’s customer promise and will do so long term. This is easier to facilitate when you can filter prospective employees and connect with those that match your company’s culture.

But while all of this innovation sounds like a great idea, are there any pitfalls in this model? Tune in to find out!

Service Strategies offers a wide variety of Consulting Services for Support, eService, Field Service and Professional Services operations for technology companies. We have helped industry leading service and support operations enhance operational efficiency and drive world class levels of performance, while improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Join Service Strategies at their Service Industry Summit event, which brings together leaders from companies like Cisco, Dell and others to discuss the challenges of a changing service landscape. As part of the event, an informative Customer Success Workshop will be held on October 27th. Visit servicestrategies.com to learn more.

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

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In honor of the 50th episode of Crack the Customer Code, we've selected 50 customer service sound bites across a wide range of concepts. From designing and delivering great customer experience to overused clichés, these tips run the gamut, and we are excited to share them with you!

Service Strategies offers a wide variety of Consulting Services for Support, eService, Field Service and Professional Services operations for technology companies. We have helped industry leading service and support operations enhance operational efficiency and drive world class levels of performance, while improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Join Service Strategies at their Service Industry Summit event, which brings together leaders from companies like Cisco, Dell and others to discuss the challenges of a changing service landscape. As part of the event, an informative Customer Success Workshop will be held on October 27th. Visit servicestrategies.com to learn more.

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

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We’ve all encountered scripted customer greetings at one point or another in our lives. Are these greetings an effective strategy when crafting customer experience?

Customer greetings are the introduction to your business and a reminder of excellent service as a customer leaves. As we all know, first and last impressions are fantastic points of reference for customers when calling your business to mind. These greetings can offer consistency and identity for your brand.

In addition, customer greetings add structure and guidance for your team, allowing them to understand your customer experience mission and how to interact with consumers in a way that supports rather than detracts from your company identity.

The key to the effectiveness of a greeting lies in it’s purpose, context, and sincerity. As Adam points out, "put the customer ahead of the customer experience checklist."

Want to learn the methodology of crafting customer greetings that support your brand promise and key into the exact type of customer your company caters to?

Service Strategies offers a wide variety of Consulting Services for Support, eService, Field Service and Professional Services operations for technology companies. We have helped industry leading service and support operations enhance operational efficiency and drive world class levels of performance, while improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Join Service Strategies at their Service Industry Summit event, which brings together leaders from companies like Cisco, Dell and others to discuss the challenges of a changing service landscape. As part of the event, an informative Customer Success Workshop will be held on October 27th. Visit servicestrategies.com to learn more.

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

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John Warrillow, the founder of the Value Builder System and bestselling author, joins the podcast this week to introduce strategies entrepreneurs can use to create loyal customers based on subscriptions.

Millennials are more concerned with acquiring the rights to products and services rather than stock-piling assets. With the advent of the sharing economy and services such as Netflix and Spotify ruling the online subscription world, how can business leaders get customers to bed in with a specific company subscription?

In addition, how can business leaders determine the subscription model that best suits their needs? With both business to business product models and business to consumer product models, entrepreneurs have very specific options, and the wrong model may hurt projected outcome.

John is a strong advocate of a subscription’s ability to change a customer’s behavior. By implementing subscription models, businesses build relationships based on trust, creating long-term, deeply invested customers.

Want to implement these strategies and discover which model is best for your business? Learn how by tuning in today.

Recognized by Fortune and Inc. Magazines, John Warrillow is the author of the "Best Business Book of 2011," Built To Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You. His new book, The Automatic Customer hit shelves in February and has already been recognized as a "Best Book of 2015".

Customer Experience is hot… but are you taking advantage of its huge potential to make your services business more prominent and profitable? Join Service Strategies for an informative Customer Experience Workshop in San Diego on October 27th. You’ll learn how to create customer success while generating profitable revenue for your services business. The workshop is part of the Service Industry Summit event, which bring together leaders from companies like Cisco, Dell and others to discuss the challenges of a changing service landscape. Visit servicestrategies.com to learn more.

               Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

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Customer satisfaction ratings haven’t improved since the 1970’s, in fact, they've declined. With so many tools and resources at our disposal, why does customer service still stink?

In a recent study performed by Consumer Reports, 80% of people surveyed had some issue with a recent transaction—they had returned merchandise, questioned a bill, or simply left the store without making their intended purchase.

Now digital sales present a new round of challenges for marketers. Customer experience on mobile devices or an entrepreneur’s website can lead to devastating statistics (for example, 60% of users abandon their intended purchase when a website’s load time is too slow).

Metrics may reveal an issue, but not the basic fabric of why the issue exists, and in our fast paced, social media based world, customer expectations are evolving quicker than ever. How can entrepreneurs keep customer empowerment at the forefront while identifying potential customer satisfaction issues before they are blown out of proportion?

Listen to today’s episode to learn how smart, savvy leaders create ideal scenarios for their customers and for themselves.

Service Strategies offers a wide variety of Consulting Services for Support, eService, Field Service and Professional Services operations for technology companies. We have helped industry leading service and support operations enhance operational efficiency and drive world class levels of performance, while improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Join Service Strategies at their Service Industry Summit event, which brings together leaders from companies like Cisco, Dell and others to discuss the challenges of a changing service landscape. As part of the event, an informative Customer Success Workshop will be held on October 27th. Visit servicestrategies.com to learn more.

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

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Tom Schwab describes how business leaders can implement NPS and inbound marketing to focus on customer satisfaction and offer them the products and services they need.

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