Write-Offs lead to Write-Offs

It doesn't always feel good to go to extreme lengths to pacify a customer. It can be hard to remember the upside, to know that your work is ultimately going to pay of. So here is an overriding philosophy which can help you through thankless moments: Individual customer are irreplaceable. Regardless of the size of your market segment, once you start writing customers, we can predict the day in the future when you will be out of business. Think you have a huge market and it is okay to kiss off customers and replace them down the road? Making this assumption will let imports chip away at the edges until there was little remaining as a core.

My suggestion is that you think of every one of your customers as a core customer - and treat the loss of a customer as a tragedy to be avoided.

Who should handle customer complaints?

Everyone should handle customer complaints. Of course, not everyone is going to be equally involve in customer service, nor should each employee be trained in the most specialised service. We do believe it is important that all employees participate to some degree - to the extent of their trainability and the extent to which they interact with the customers.
But who should handle cases that can't be resolved by a staffer on the front line? In other words, who should serve as "the manager" for a customer who demands to "speak with a manager"? Here are a couple of guideline:

• Empower your employees to be able to resolve the issue whenever possible without getting to the "manager" level.
• When unavoidable, you need the designated "manager" to stand out in 2 areas: as a sharp and eager problem solver and as a virtuoso at connecting empathically with people. If you have hired and trained appropriately, all of your staff will have some strength in these areas. But only about 1 in 10 will be unusually gifted in both areas. Those 10% should be your designated service "manager" - if indeed you choose to have such a position.

If you are going to involved the whole company in customer service, you should involved them fully: entrust them with broad discretionary powers to respond flexibly, creatively, and intensively to service errors.
So in order to keep customers happy, your people will need to be able to respond in an empowered and immediate way to service failures - without waiting for a manager's okay. This carte blanche approach has grown even more important in these days of customer rebellions Twittering out of control: Only with immediate and broad discretionary powers is there a chance your frontline employees will be able to defuse complaints before they get posted online.

Excellence Service Tips Part 3

1. The goal of an excellent service organisation is to deliver outstanding results with average employees
2. Many companies design service models for employees they don't have - for a payroll filled superstars when, in fact, there's a healthy range of talent and initiative on the team. Capture this reality in the design of the business model
3. Successful employee management systems have 4 main components: selection, training, job design and performance management. These components must be internally consistent and aligned with the rest of the service model. There's no such thing as good or bad selection. The issued is whether it's consistent with the rest of the employee management system and whether the system is consistent with the rest of the service model
4. IT solutions can help or hurt your employees' productivity, often in dramatic ways. IT tools that work are sensitive to the employee experience, including how and when data is entered in the rhythm of a particular job. The best solutions are developed in tandem with the role itself - not piled on after a job design is already in place
5. The average service employee is overwhelmed by the increasing complexity of his or her job. When a company identifies a gap like this between operational complexity and employee sophistication, it has 2 choices: train and hire differently or redesign the job so that your current team can do it

How should you compensate a customer for a service or product failure?

It depends. And that variability, in fact, is what's most important. Customers have diverse values and preferences- so your people who placate disgruntled customers need to be given enormous discretion. Still, there are principles that apply:

• Most customers understand that things can and will go wrong. What they do not understand, accept, or find interesting are excuses. For example, they don't care about your org chart. You mentioning that a problem originated in a different department is of no interest to them.
• Don't panic. Customers' sense of trust and camaraderie increases after a problem is successfully resolved, compared to if you had never had the problem in the first place. This makes sense, since you now have a shared experience. You have solved something by working closely together.
• Avoid assuming you know what solution a customer wants or "should" want.Ask. And if a customer makes a request that sounds extreme or absurd, don't rush to dismiss it. Even if it seems on its face impossible, there may be a creative way to make the requested solution, or something a lot like it, happen.
• Don't strive for "fairness" or "justice". Our archetypal doting Italian mama doesn't investigate whether her bambino obeyed the sidewalk speed limit before comforting him, and a customer's warm feelings for a company aren't about fairness. They're about being treated especially well.
• Learn from customer issues, but don't use them as an opportunity to discipline or train your staff in front of your customer. This may sound obvious, but it happens quite often. Watch out for this flaw, special when you're under stress.
• Don't imagine you are doing something special for a customer by making things how they should have been in the first place. The chance to get it right the first time? It's gone. So re-creating how things should have been is just a first step. You need to then give the customer something extra. Mam bandages a knee and offers a lollipop. If you aren't sure which "extra" to offer a particular customer, just make it clear you want to offer something. If the customer doesn't like red lollipops or doesn't eat sugar, she will let you know. Then you can decide together on a different treat.
• Keep in mind the lifetime value of a loyal customer. A loyal customer is likely worth a small fortune to your company when considered over a decade or two of regular purchases. Research shows that the lifetime value of a loyal customer to be up to $100,000 and occasionally more. It is well worth figuring out that number and keeping it in mind if you ever feel that temptation to quarrel with a customer over, say, an overnight shipping bill.

Excellence Service Tips Part 2

1. Service excellence must be funded in some way. If not, you risk delivering gratuitous service, service features that are donated to customers but never paid for in any way.
2. There are 4 ways to fund a premium service experience: (a) get customers to pay you extra for it, (b) reduce costs in ways that also improve service, (c) improve service in ways that also reduce costs, or (d) get customers to enjoy doing some of the work for you.
3. Extra service fees aren't inherently good or bad. Their success depends on the specific contract you have with customers.
4. A loyalty program is one way to get paid for  premium service experience. True loyalty programs-programs that increase customers' willingness to pay a premium price- are rare, largely because most loyalty programs are mislabelled retention programs.
5. For self-service to be part of an uncommon service experience, customers must prefer self-service to a full-service alternative. 

CEO of Zappos saying

In 2009, the CEO Tong Hsieh spelled out the company's approach more explicitly:

We view most of the money that we put into the customer experience as our marketing dollars. The number one driver of our business is repeat customers and word of mouth, so most of the money that we would have spent on paid advertising we put toward things like free shipping both ways, surpeise upgrades to overnight shipping, our call centre, and our warehouse, which run 24/7- which isn't actually the most efficient way to run the warehouse. The most efficient way is to let the orders pile up, but because we run it 24/7 to get our orders out as quickly as possible, customers can order as late as midnight Eastern(time), and it is on their doorstep 8 hours later. That creates that 'Wow!" effect, and they remember that for a long time. And then they tell their friends.

The saying above shows us that such revenue doesn't strictly comes from marketing strategies or even advertising. Most of all, it comes from service which makes people keep talking about it and it tends to sink into your customers first thought.

Excellence Service Tips Part 1

1. To achieve service excellence, you must underperform in strategic ways. This means delivering on the service dimensions your customer value most, and then making it possible-profitable and sustainable-- by performing poorly on the dimensions they value least. In other words, you must be bad in the service of good.
2. The primary obstacle to service excellence is not the ambition to be great, but the stomach to be bad. This is an emotional obstacle.
3. It's difficult to compete without understanding your customers' needs and how well your competitors are meeting those needs. Fortunately, customers are typically very willing to give you that information. And it's cheap and easy to ask them for it.
4. There is an important distinction between marketing and operating segments. Marketing segments tell us how to identify and communicate with different kinds of customers. Operating segments tells us how to serve customers differently. There is rarely a one-to-one mapping between these segments.
5. There are 2 key ways to improve service: (a)meet your customers' existing needs more effectively, or (b)convince your customers that they need something you already do well.
6. There is a different between financial models and service models. Service companies need to be "bilingual" to excel.