Frank Reactions - Customer Experience & Customer Service in the Digital Era

This is a replay of one of our most popular episodes, first aired in April of 2016. If you missed it, have a listen; lots of good stuff in here!

If you’ve ever worked in customer service, there’s a good chance you’ve had to deal with cranky, unreasonable, lying (or at least, exaggerating) customers.

It can be sooooo frustrating!

And yet, we keep preaching that our front line staff have to be nice to customers. Be respectful. Be empathetic.

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Is that even a reasonable thing to expect of our staff?

The Point Is Not To Prove Who’s Right

Today’s podcast guest, Adam Toporek, author of Be Your Customer’s Hero: Real World Tips and Techniques for the Front Line, knows first hand about unreasonable customers: he’s spent many years in retail having to deal with them.

The trick, he maintains, is to give the customer the benefit of the doubt, but, as they used to say in nuclear disarmament talks “trust, but verify.”

He’s a strong advocate of documentation, because there are some customers who will try to take advantage of you. Ultimately you may have to stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. Documentation will help you know when that time has come.

That said, when customers return products or want refunds or claim they’ve been mistreated, “the point is not to prove who’s right.” The point is to calm them down and try to turn the situation around.

So if you’ve got records proving that you had, in fact, left three phone messages for them and they insist you never called, you don’t want to get into an argument, but it may help to be able to say, “Well, our records show that we did leave messages at these three times, but I guess you didn’t get them, so now that we are talking, let’s try to get your problem resolved.”

Having the documentation will make you feel more secure and confident as you then flip the conversation away from arguing about who’s right and back to trying to find a solution that everyone will be comfortable with.

The documentation can also help prove the customer is right. Our memories and perceptions are not very accurate. We may firmly believe that we called the customer three times, when in fact, we thought about it several times but only actually called and left a message once. Having the documentation helps avoid exaggeration on both sides of the counter.

“It’s a balance,” says Toporek, “Sometimes you have to say no, but often small businesses go too far the other way.”

Empowering Employees To Really Help Customers

In the interview we also discussed the need to give customer service employees guidelines and training so that they know how to handle different types of customer problems, and what level of compensation they can offer without having to get permission. (Here’s a link to Adam’s extensive article on employee empowerment: 

How a Chocolate Bar Turned Customer Service Expert Shep Hyken Into a Big Fan

Customer service expert Shep Hyken tells a story in today’s interview of walking into a hotel and being given a full chocolate bar and bottle of water when he checked in.

Nice little customer service touch, you think.

But the thing is, at the prices they were charging for the rooms, this would have cost them about 6% of the room rate! (Who knew that big name speakers don’t always get to stay at five star hotels?)

That’s a pretty big hit to the bottom line.

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Was it worth the cost?

In our social media era, absolutely. Why?

1. It made the hotel visit memorable.

You wouldn’t think a little thing like that would make such a difference, but I felt the same way the first time I walked into a hotel that had fresh baked cookies at reception. I still remember the name of that hotel (Adara, in Whistler) and tell others about it.

A chocolate square on the pillow used to work, but now it has become so common that, even though we like it, that won’t be enough to wow us anymore.

Think about what you can do that would add a little touch to make a big difference.

2. Shep Hyken speaks to thousands of people a year. The experience impressed him so much that he talks about that hotel.

(Sadly for them, he didn’t mention the name of it in this interview, but he probably has at other times, and he has definitely recommended the hotel to colleagues travelling in the area.)

3. It uses the principle of reciprocity.

When people do something nice for you, you are more likely to do something nice for them. This special touch makes visitors much more likely to take time to do a positive hotel review on Trip Advisor, Yelp, or Booking.com.

4. If it gets even one person to book a night who wouldn’t have otherwise, it has paid for itself many times over.

It doesn’t take a lot of word of mouth for those chocolate bars to help keep the hotel’s rooms booked.

Other Customer Experience Thoughts from Shep Hyken

We talked about the challenges of getting buy-in across the organization.

“If it doesn’t start at the top,” he warns, “it’s not going to work.“

Hyken’s 6 Ds of Great Customer Service

This 6-step process is key to having a good customer service culture, says Hyken.

* Define it. What does customer experience mean in this company? Develop common wording so everyone understands and talks about it the same way.

* Disseminate it. Make sure everyone in the company knows what the experience is that you are trying to create.

* Deploy it. Do a lot of training, and keep on doing it. “Customer service & experience training isn’t something that you did, it’s something that you do,” says Hyken.

* Demonstrate it. The CEO and other top leaders must show, through their actions, that they are committed to the organization’s customer experience goals.

* Defend it. Keep your eyes and ears open for chances to recognize and reward those who are doing it right,

Tema Frank's interview with Jeff Toister, author of The Service Culture Handbook.

In this episode you’ll find out:

- The 3 elements of a good cs vision statement

- Why you should NOT – according to Toister – consult with customers when developing a CS vision statement!

- The 1 question you should ask colleagues from all over your organization when you are developing your cx vision statement

- What “cultural artifacts” are and how they affect your efforts to improve cx

Retail Survival = Seamless Experiences

One of my favorite omnichannel retail stories is from Tesco in Korea. So when I spoke about changes in the retail world at the Seamless Africa conference a few weeks ago, I put up this picture and talked about it.

Tesco developed a system where they display store shelves on a subway wall, and tired commuters simply scan the items they want to buy. By the time their commute is over, the items are waiting for them at home.

Brilliant!

The speaker right after me was Vinod Bidarkoppa, Senior Vice President & Group Chief Information and Technology Officer at Future Group in India.

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Turns out he was the one who developed that program for Tesco!

Naturally, I couldn’t resist snagging him for an interview.

Bidarkoppa has worked as a Chief Information Officer (CIO) at large retailers and airlines, and overseen projects to move from purely bricks and mortar to multichannel or omnichannel.

Here are his thoughts on the changes happening in retail and how to make retailers more customer friendly.

Tesco was one of the early retailers to realize that multichannel was inevitable and make the necessary investments in technology to enable it. Says Vinod, it was “all about bringing tech conveniences to the hands of the customer.”

What’s holding retailers back?

Retailers worldwide are watching their traditional store sales erode. They know they have to change, but many aren’t doing so, or aren’t doing it well.

Why?

As we discuss in the interview, there are several factors that have to be in place to make the shift to omnichannel retail successfully:

1. CEO buy-in isn’t enough.

Given the magnitude of the changes required, Board buy-in is also essential.

2. Major technology investments are necessary

Although the cost of technology has dropped a lot in the past few years, it is still an investment. One that involves both significant risk and the likelihood of it being obsolete within five years. Like it or not, that’s the world we now live in. Think of it the same way you would of investing in new stores. It is not just an IT add-on.

3. Silos = death

Customers don’t see the silos; they just see that the organization isn’t working for them. As Vinod put it, “all [customers] want is a super, super experience in a seamless way.”

 

4. To end silos you must completely change your metrics.

The behaviors you’ve rewarded in the past are likely to prevent those you need now.

 

Amazon Is Powerful, But You Can Compete

Despite Amazon’s massive growth (it now accounts for approximately half of all online retail sales), the bulk of consumer retail still happens offline.

There’s no doubt that more retail sales will continue to move online, so you cannot ignore that channel. But to survive, retailers also need to completely rethink the store experience.

“Experience” is the key word in that sentence.

Increasingly people will only go to stores for the experience. It had better be one that’s worth their time and travel hassle.

What can you offer to make your in-store experience special?

What is related but unusual to see in a store of your type?

Here are two examples to get you thinking:

* UK grocer, Waitrose, has in-store wine bars.

Kris Andreychuk, Supervisor of Community Safety in the City of Edmonton's Neighbourhood Empowerment Team, was frustrated. His teams of social workers, police officers and youth workers were great at helping move criminals or juvenile offenders onto a better path after they'd been involved in a crime, but he wanted to predict areas where crime would be most likely to be brewing so they could work to improve those neighborhoods before crimes happened. We discuss how they did it, some surprising results, and the need to combine powerful machine learning algorithms with human intelligence.

That led him to contact Stephane Contre, Chief Analytics Officer of Edmonton's Open City Team, to see how they could use the masses of data the City had access to in order to identify patterns that are likely to cause crime in a particular area.

Social Customer Care is Scary, But Inevitable

I won’t lie to you: there’s a lot that can go wrong when you are interacting with customers online.

But more and more customers are turning to social media when they’ve got a problem or complaint. If you aren’t there to offer that social customer care, things can easily get out of control and you might not even know that a tsunami is about to hit you till you’re drowning.

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But according to today’s guest, Dan Gingiss, author of the new book,

Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media, not only is social customer care inevitable, it can actually be a really good thing for your business.

How Social Customer Care Can Help Your Business

* Social customer care, done right, can convert people from angry to advocates.

* It is cheaper than telephone-based customer service.

* It can make your contact center staff happier. Nobody ever calls with praise, but they do offer praise in social media.

* It can give you insight into customer frustrations that might not be big enough to call you about, but are annoying enough to share on social media. You can get a competitive edge by proactively solving them.

* Sometimes a picture can help you spot and solve a problem way faster than a telephone conversation. (In the interview Gingiss talks about a company that realized, once they saw a photo, that the customer had two cords plugged in to the wrong places.)

The Main Difference in Hiring for Social Customer Care vs Traditional Contact Center Staff

As with traditional customer service staff, having traits like empathy are crucial.

You can train them on the tools, but if they don’t have the right attitude, you’ll soon have problems.

The big difference, though, is that they have to be good writers, says Gingiss.

It is so easy to misinterpret the written word, especially when it has to be short enough to Tweet. Good writers are less likely to be misunderstood.

At the same time, you also want them to be able to respond quickly; they don’t have time to compose the perfect 140 characters.

And to make it even more complicated, they should be able to show a little personality in their writing. People don’t want to think they are being answered by a bot.

Also Discussed In This Interview

* How to choose the right tools for managing social customer care (including things like ensuring “collision avoidance” — when different staff respond to the same comment — and tools that let you route higher priority people on social media to the front of the queue).

* Social listening secrets (like looking for misspellings of your brand name).

* How and when to use humor in responding on social media.

* Budget allocation between marketing and customer care.

Get a Free Report on Twitter-Based Customer Care

We studied 104 companies that sell online to see how well they handled a simple help request on Twitter. In this free report on Twitter-based customer service you’ll find out:

Investment Management Firm’s Success Starts With Values

I just got back from an amazing two weeks in South Africa, where I spoke at the Seamless Africa Conference, interviewed people like today’s podcast guest, Nomi Bodlani from investment management firm, Allan Gray and then explored the history, politics, beauty and wine of the region.

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(If you are curious, you can  see my photos and video clips from Cape Town and surrounding regions here.)

Nomi Bodlani is the Client Experience Team Lead at Allan Gray. The company was founded in 1973, and has been hugely successful. The founder of this  investment management firm, Allan Gray, is now one of the richest men in the world. The firm itself is the largest privately-owned asset manager in South Africa, according to Forbes, with $35 billion in assets.

What impressed me about the company is that from the start it has been values-driven and customer focused. Over and over again in our interview Bodlani talked about how the values (or what I call the Promise in the 3P Profit Formula) have been used to guide decisions at the firm.

Values Are Clear, Explicit & Guide Decisions

The core values, says Bodlani, are for the firm and its employees to be:

* client focused

* individually accountable

* independent minded

* performance driven

* long-term oriented.

Employees Train on Values & the Technical Side

New employees in this 1,000 person firm undergo extensive training on the values as well as the technical aspects of their jobs.

During their first three days of training they hear super-hero stories about extraordinary lengths investment management front line and other staff have gone to in order to solve client problems or exceed their expectations.

The company has also chosen to keep its set of investment products simple. Keeping things simple makes it easier for staff and clients to understand and choose the right vehicles for their investment goals.

It is just too easy for companies to get carried away with new products and features. When that happens, their staff can’t reasonably be expected to know and understand them all, let alone explain them to clients. Often that can lead to the downfall of companies, as many a high-tech entrepreneur has learned the hard way.

Allan Gray has avoided that trap, although, admittedly it does mean that they are not on the cutting edge of new products or whizz bang website technology.

On the other hand, the solid relationships between the company, its investment managers and its clients meant that “our clients still trusted us even though our website didn’t look like the others they saw.”

Think About The Why

In training, employees are taught to consider how every aspect of what they do, no matter what part of the organization they work in, has an eventual impact on customer satisfaction.

Even something as mundane as making sure they get the client’s name and contact information right isn’t just a checklist item: if you get something wrong, it could mean that the client doesn’t get what they are waiting for, or that their privacy is violated because somebo...

 

In today’s podcast interview, multiple best-selling author, Chip Bell, discusses his new book, Kaleidoscope: Delivering Innovative Service That Sparkles, and the importance of going beyond good customer service to — not great service, but unique value service.

In other words, you don’t have to do heroics to create an experience that is memorable enough that people want to tell others about it. And that, says Bell, is what you are aiming for in order to maximize profits and satisfy customers.

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Unique Value vs Added Value

I still remember the first time I was greeted with freshly baked chocolate chip cookies when I checked in to a hotel. (I also remember which hotel it was: the Adara Hotel in Whistler). At that time, it was what Bell calls “value unique.”

Since then the idea has been copied by others, so it is more of a “value added,” which is still nice, but not as likely to get people talking about your organization.

The other problem with “value added” as opposed to “value unique,” says Bell, is that value added keeps raising the customer experience bar. Once others start doing it, it becomes expected, like the animal shaped folded towels in high-end resorts.

Then it is no longer memorable (though its absence might be), and the financial burden of continual value adds can kill your profitability.

Creating Unique Value Without Breaking the Bank

Unique value can come from the smallest of things, but helps people remember the experience.

A simple, no-cost example: When I bought my new car, the saleswoman (who actually listened to what we wanted, unlike the salesmen we’d dealt with elsewhere) had made up an acronym to help me remember my new license plate number. (It starts with BHT, so she called it Beautiful, Happy Tema.) That was five years ago, and I still remember it and who made up the acronym!

Brainstorm some ideas with your staff about little touches you could add that would deliver unique value. Quirky is good. Encourage craziness… you can always scale back later.

The key here is to involve your front-line staff in generating the ideas. As the ones who interact the most with your customers, they are most likely to know what little touches would be appreciated and stand out.

Mentioned in This Episode

Matt Dixon, and his wonderful book, The Effortless Experience. (I’m hoping to get him on the show in the next little while. He’ll be the headliner at the upcoming CXPA Insight Exchange. You should come!

Mary Miller and Jancoa Janitorial Service’s Dream Manager program.

Ray Attiyah, and his book The Fearless Front Line

Question: What’s the most memorable, unique touch you’ve ever experienced?

Please scroll down and comment below.

During the last recession, Brian Gracon, author of Meconomics 101: 16 Ways to Improve Your Marketing, Selling and Business Management for Today’s Consumers, wondered why it was that some businesses were still busy, even when unemployment was high. What was their secret to being recession-proof?

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It’s All About Me

The secret, it seems, is that people are emotional creatures, not the rational actors we were taught about in economics class.

What selling boils down to, in a recession or at any other time, says Gracon, is appealing to these three factors that drive customer behavior:

* Self-image

* Entertainment

* Pampering

1. Self-image

People who line up for hours to buy the latest iPhone have a self-image of being cutting edge technology adopters. People who buy at discount stores may have a self-image of being frugal.  As Gracon puts it in his book,

So think about the self-images of your target customers, and then design your marketing to appeal to those self-images.

2. Entertainment

Why do people pay hundreds of dollars to hear a band perform in a giant stadium with lousy sound, when for far less they could own and listen to a high-quality recording of every song that band ever wrote?

Because of the entertainment value.

Sitting at home listening to the music, even dancing in front of your mirror, can’t compete with the feeling of being in a crowd of like minded people all bopping together.

3. Pampering

When you shop at Holt Renfrew or Nordstrom you pay a premium for pampering. Yes, the clothes they sell are of high quality. But you can buy equal quality for less in stores like Winners. But at Winners, you won’t have a sales rep catering to your needs and wants, advising you, finding “just the thing” for you.

Different self-image draws each to their own type of store. Winners could even be argued to offer entertainment, in that for many people hunting through racks to find that amazing deal is entertaining. But pampering? No.

All 3 Together = Irresistible = Recession-Proof

Each of the three “lenses,” as Gracon calls them, will attract customers. But if you can combine two, or better yet, all three of them, you’ve got an offer that is no longer price-bound.

As I wrote in PeopleShock, people will pay to go to Disney even when they know they can’t afford it. It meets all three emotional criteria:

* Their self-image as great parents.

* Their desire to be entertained.

* The pampering Disney gives its customers.

Want to Recession-Proof Your Business?

Even in the B2B World it IS Possible

In business-to-business sales:

* Self-image may be to seem savvy to their superiors. Or to showcase their talents (invite them to co-present at a conference). Or to get the best value.

* Entertainment can be offered in the cliche ways (golf, fancy restaurant meals, sports tickets) or in more creative ways that are tailored to the type of prospect you are selling to. (I’d far rather have fringe theatre tickets!)

* Pampering: well,

OK, so Grant Cardone may love cold calling, but most of us hate it. (And, frankly, I find Cardone’s approach seriously off-putting). So, like many people, I was thrilled when “inbound marketing” became a thing.

I had fantasies about never having to cold call again. 

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But as the amount of content on the Internet has skyrocketed, the dream of just being “found” naturally as a result of your great inbound marketing content has become less and less likely. 

So the need to make sales calls isn’t going away. (Darn!)

As today’s guest, Jill Konrath, puts it in our interview,

“I’m not going to sit here an wait until somebody from [my target customer] stumbles across my website.”

That huge content overload (what Mark Schaeffer called “content shock“), not only makes it harder for you to reach your prospects, it even makes it harder for your sales people to do their jobs well. Because they are also dealing with content overload.

Even Konrath realized she was struggling with Internet-based distractions, which led to her new book, More Sales, Less Time. It talks about the things she’s done to overcome the overwhelm; something we also discuss in today’s podcast.

How You Sell Matters

But how we sell is vitally important to the customer experience. If I get a Cardone-type on the call, I’m outta there!

And I’ll be warning all my friends to stay away.

Konrath  is one of the sales gurus whose approach to sales is a lot more aligned with what I believe makes for good customer experiences.

It’s about building a relationship based on honesty and openness, right from the start. A relationship that will leave prospects feeling good about you, whether or not they ultimately become customers.

 

Now to be fair, with good content marketing, some inbound calls or emails are likely to happen. But they probably won’t be enough to keep you in business. Even Hubspot — one of the first companies to really push the idea of “inbound marketing” — admits that it does outbound sales too.

Sales in the Digital Era

So if you can’t rely on inbound marketing efforts, what do you do instead?

Well, the elements of inbound are still important:

*

You need a good, informative website.

Pretty well everybody is going to go to your website before contacting you, and/or after you’ve reached out to them. It had better answer their questions. (You might find our 85 Tips to a Winning Website helpful.)

*

Social media matters.

It’s like advertising: it builds brand awareness, which can make people more open to talking to you when you try to contact them.

*

Target specific niches, and develop content just for them.

Some of this content you’ll use on the webs...