Category: Customer Service

Categories
Customer Service

The Folly of eBay: Forgetting What Made You Great

I am struck by how often a good product or service will be the victim of its own success. Scaling a business is challenging, no doubt, but I am amazed at how often companies abandon the principles of their early days in order to scale.
I recently tried to build a eBay store for a client. It had been awhile since I had built a store, and I was surprised at the number of changes that had taken place. Most were for the better, including a streamlined and intuitive interface that adds a layer of consistency to product listings, features which help sellers filter through the ever-multiplying pages of products.
What stopped me in my tracks was the onerous burden that had been placed on Sellers. The client had been paying for the store for 3 months when I was able to get their products up, but no sooner had they appeared when the account was suspended pending verification. A long process ensued, whereby we were stuck trying to decipher the cryptic suspension notice and what to do next. All the product listings were immediately removed (an hour lost there), and there was no immediate way to rectify the situation.
Interestingly, the email did not provide a phone number to call. We were instead directed to a webpage, which didn’t answer any of our questions, and ultimately led to a convoluted process whereby we had to request a PIN to call and reach someone.
After sorting out the problem (we needed to provide ID to verify my client’s identity), we faxed in our documentation and waited. 48 hours later, we were still waiting, so I called eBay back. The reason there was no response: it takes 72 hours to scan all the faxes they receive (or so they say). When I asked why they weren’t digitized automatically using technology that dates back about 25 years, the customer service rep said no, they print and scan every one. Why does that seem like it can’t possibly be true?

Forgetting How You Became Successful

I can understand why these processes are now in place. As eBay has grown, the opportunities for fraud expanded exponentially. Despite constituting a small percentage of listings, a sheer volume of fraudulent auctions creates enormous headaches. Reducing fraud is an admirable, and important objective.
The problem occurs when you place the burden squarely on the people who create the market in the first place. ID checks, puny monthly sales limits, and long wait periods to get money from Paypal all add to a rather miserable customer experience. If eBay had started this way, it would have died an anonymous death 6 months after launching.

Don’t let Success Steamroll Your Values

I’m sure Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll never envisioned a site where sellers were forced to endure security checks more lengthy and bureaucratic than a National Security clearance badge. I imagine they would be mortified at how the site has taken on a grossly inefficient apparatus that serves to stifle growth of the site.
In an era where 5 minutes gets me a listing on Craigslist for free, why would anyone endure the hassle and cost of using eBay? For some products, it is clearly worth the effort, and the global marketplace cannot be rivaled. I use it to buy electronic parts constantly, and I would be the first to admit that it is a wondrous place for niche items you can’t find elsewhere, no matter how large a city you live in.
So here we wait, hoping we can get the products up next week. The experience has left a bitter taste, not only because of the messy, inefficient, and maddening bureaucracy, but also the inevitable and inescapable feeling that they just don’t care. I’ve heard 29 ‘sorry for the inconvenience, Sir’, but not one person has tried to actually fix the problem. When you start supplying customers with empty apologies and outlandish excuses, like the print and scan every fax excuse, you’ve lost your way.

For those running your own small business, remember that it is the values you hold most closely that your customers will respect you for. Betray those values, and you risk eroding your business from its very foundation.

Categories
Customer Service Marketing

How To Answer Your Business Phone (Please!)

Do I have the wrong number?

I love working with small businesses. I really do. The people I’ve met over the years have been amazing – inventive, creative, thoughtful, and above all, hard working.
Which is why I shed a tear inside every time I call a small business and someone answers ‘Hello.’ Just ‘Hello’. Nothing else. Nada.
I find this particularly applies to tradespeople. My estimate is about 15% of small business owners or employees answer with a sentence that identifies them or their business. Worse yet, about a quarter answer with just a ‘Yes’, or just their first name, barked out in an annoyed tone.
If you are one of those people, even the odd time, can I please please please implore you to change your ways. I really want to know I’ve reached Al’s Appliance Repair, or Steve’s Superior Painters, or Mike’s Mechanics. Really, I do. I really want to avoid asking ‘Is this Phil’s Phone Technicians?’ – it makes me feel awkward, and probably makes you think ‘Of course it is – who do you think you’re calling?’
By identifying yourself properly, it is a win-win situation. I know I’ve called the right number, you take the pride in announcing your business. We both start off the conversation on the right foot and get down to business.

The Importance of Phone Etiquette

While my introduction applied to my experiences with tradespeople, I have noticed that business professionals have similar afflictions. And don’t get me started on younger folk – I actually had this exchange with a job applicant:

Applicant: “Yeah.”

Me – “Can I speak to Steve, please?”

Applicant: “Yeah.”

Me: “Steve, it’s Chris Healy speaking.”

Applicant: “Yeah.”

Hey, I’m not perfect either, but there are limits.

The problem with all these phone introductions is that I really don’t know you, and your first impression is overwhelmingly underwhelming. It is like seeing a bad advertisement for a product – the product may be amazing, but the ad is so bad, it transfers a perception of low-quality to the product. If you don’t care enough to make a good ad, what is your attention to detail on the product?

If you don’t think this is true, look at the overwhelming body of evidence that supports how much weight we place on physical appearance and ‘first impressions.’ We may try to guard against it, but the cold, hard reality is that we have formed unconscious evaluations within 30 seconds of meeting everyone. If you looked like you’ve slept in a bathtub when I meet you, that image is going to be stuck in my head forever, no matter what you wear next time.

Whether I am looking for a web developer or a pipefitter, my overriding criteria is ‘can you do the job?’. If you answer the phone professionally when I call you, I am primed and ready to hear your message. If you sound like Sylvester Stallone in Rocky, and grunt ‘hello’ into the phone, my expectation of professionalism goes out the window.

Remember – I am calling you. This is my business that I am bringing to YOU. This is the best thing that can happen in sales – the warm lead! I am calling because I have a need that you can potentially fill. Don’t let this opportunity go to waste by giving an unprofessional image! It is a tragedy that can be fixed by just a few more words.

“Chris’ Carpentry and Cabinets, Chris speaking.”

Was it that hard? Of course not. Sure, keep the quick salutations to people you know, but that is the beauty of call display: you should know when Uncle Billy is calling you with the latest political joke he’s heard versus a potential new customer. Even if you just use your full name, it is better than the one word grunt.

And if you are in an office, whether in your first job or a seasoned executive, for heaven’s sake – please let me know who you are. Tell me you are a professional by the way you answer the phone, and that you are someone I want to

a) do business with

b) potentially recruit, and/or

c) trust

So, for the last time: please answer the phone correctly. Your business will thank you for it.

 

 

Categories
Customer Service

Is Your Process Helping or Hurting You?

I recently tried a dry cleaning service that picked up and delivered right to my office. It sounded ideal, and a great solution to my problem of timing pickups. With a hectic after-work schedule, I have always struggled with getting to the local dry cleaner before 6pm. A delivery service would at least put the dry cleaning in my hands – how it got home would be a different matter.

I sensed something was wrong when I first tried to call for a pickup. No one answered, not even voicemail. This is a virtual dry cleaner, but they don’t ensure the phone is answered? The first red flag went up.

So I went to the website, and found that they recommend clients fill out a form. The form nicely captured all my contact details, but nothing about my order. It also gave no indication of when I the pickup would occur, but instead asked when I wanted the pickup. I would think nearly every client would want a pickup as soon as possible, wouldn’t you? We’re talking dry cleaning, not grand pianos. Second red flag went up the flag pole.

After waiting for 24 hours for a call back to schedule the pickup, I finally picked up the phone myself. After some friendly banter and a few questions, I asked when I could schedule a pickup. The response: I had to wait 7 business days until someone was “in my area”. I work 6 kilometers from their main office, and it takes 7 business days to get a pickup?

Undeterred, despite red flag number 3, I arranged a pickup. Late on the scheduled day, my bag of dry cleaning was picked up while I am out of the office. The ‘receipt’ I received was just a generic carbon copy receipt page, with no pre-printed branding for their address or phone number. There was no scheduled delivery date, and there was no reconciliation of what was in the bag – my only record of what I gave them is my own notes. Red flags 4 through 6 went up.

As I am writing this post, it has now been a full week since the pickup. I have received nothing from them regarding the status of my order, though I have been billed. The billing was accurate, but I received three emails regarding the same transaction, each one with a different piece of information.

When I finally called this morning, I was assured the delivery would take place before 5pm. It is the last workday of school March break, and the delivery window is 6 hours (and I am a 10 minute drive away)?

While I am sure the owners of this dry cleaning business have the best of intentions, they need to take a hard look at how their processes are hurting their business. And they are not alone. I meet business owners all the time who have a good product or service, but the way in which customers move from first contact to sale is deeply flawed. In fact, most owners we work with can’t accurately describe their internal process – what they think happens is often far removed from what actually transpires.

Why is this?  Small businesses, and a surprising number of large ones, usually rely on processes that were designed out of necessity. Take the simple act of invoicing. We recently met a client with multi-million dollar sales that still invoiced customers through Excel, yet wondered openly why it takes customers 42 days (on average) to pay their bill. While Excel was fine for invoicing in the beginning, the invoice process needed to evolve with the business. They were trying to power a freighter with a pair or oars! By walking through the entire chain of customer interactions, I was able to show how the inconsistent billing process was being perceived by the customers themselves, and how the inconsistency said “pay whenever you can”, as opposed to “pay within 15 days”.

The key to uncovering these breakdowns in your internal processes is to put yourself squarely in the shoes of a brand new customer. When was the last time you tried to purchase your own product, or use your own service? Have you completed a purchase on your website within the past month? Have you tried the various contact methods (phone, email, website form) to observe the response times and quality of response?

Although certainly more time consuming, getting insights directly from new customers is even more valuable, and has an even greater potential for uncovering flaws in your process. The key is to gather feedback after each customer interaction, starting with the first point of contact. Did they find the relevant information from your website? What were the key criteria for choosing your product or service? How did they feel about the initial interaction with you or your staff?

Start by drawing up a list of 3-4 key questions for each stage in the process you want to evaluate, then determine how you can capture those insights while they are still ‘fresh’. You can even outsource this process to a contract call center, providing them a list of clients to contact (from whom you’ve received permission), and have the call center follow-up after each stage. There are also numerous options for conducting online questionnaires, and affordable ways to outsource the management of these survey campaigns.

Lastly, once you’ve gathered these insights, be sure to put them into action. Identify the areas that are causing the most problems for your customers, and focus intensely on improving the process to the benefit of the customer.

In later posts, I’ll talk more about how to address the most common process flaws, but that said, even the smallest changes can yield big improvements. In the case of our client who was still invoicing using Excel, they were able to implement an online invoicing tool in half a day, and see an almost immediate reduction in their accounts receivable.

As for my dry cleaning, the convenience of pickup and delivery has definitely been outweighed by the 2+ weeks their process has required to fulfil my order. At this point, I’m just hoping my shirts come back in one piece!

Categories
Customer Service

Competing on Kindness: The SME Advantage

Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company magazine, recently posed the question “Why Is It So Hard To Be Kind?” on his Harvard Business Review blog. In the post, he tells of the experience his father had purchasing a new Buick, and how one dealer went over and above to secure his father’s business. He closes the article by asking “What is it about business that makes it so hard to be kind?”

Kindness isn’t hard. The difficulty is that in large business, it is impossible to capture kindness in a process. Customer service training involves scripts, operational procedures, and policies to follow. Consequences for disobeying these ‘rules’ are clearly defined, and more often than not, performance metrics heavily favor efficiency over quality of customer service. This trend is best observed in the legions of outsourced call centers that offer nothing more than programmed responses to customer complaints, where even the most extenuating circumstances are met with “I’m sorry, that is not allowed under our company policy”.
While uniform policies and low-cost call centers may boost the bottom line of big business, they also present unique opportunities for small and medium sized enterprise (SME) to steal customers. I call it Competing on Kindness.
Kindness isn’t being a pushover, or developing deep emotional rapport with every customer. What it means is simply treating your customers with understanding, respect, and fairness. In other words, observing the Golden Rule; treat your customers like you would want to be treated. In practice, that means adopting the philosophy of flexibility when it comes to addressing customer issues, and training employees to adopt a similarly flexible attitude when it comes to dealing with customers.
When I talk about Competing on Kindness to clients, the response I often receive is ‘I’ve tried being understanding in the past, but I’ve been burned too many times.’ Usually, being ‘burned’ has involved a customer fraudulently claiming a product or service was defective, and ultimately receiving a refund. Business owners have often felt so betrayed, and so angry at themselves for ‘being gullible’, that they immediately implemented a policy to eliminate any similar event from occurring in the future.
Customer service policies are often like fishing dragnets, capturing everything and dragging them along the proverbial sea floor, dolphins be damned.

While this has the effect of eliminating that specific type of fraud from occurring again, it has the unintended consequence of punishing customers that have valid reasons for returning a product, or complaining about the service they receive. Customer service policies are thus like fishing dragnets, capturing everything and dragging them along the proverbial sea floor, dolphins be damned.
Here’s the catch- the customer who felt they were mistreated by your policy is about to become your biggest detractor, while the fraudster in the crowd has simply moved on to a new target. As I wrote about in an earlier post, customers dissatisfied with customer service they receive are going to tell, on average, 6 other people about their experience. That is 6 other potential customers you aren’t going to see, and possibly much more if those 6 people discourage their own networks to use your business.
The reverse is also true: a customer that has received a truly extraordinary service experience will become your greatest evangelist. In writing his blog post about his father’s experience with a Buick dealer, Bill Taylor just gave General Motors a powerful and compelling endorsement in front of a highly-targeted, relevant national audience. Cadillac not only lost Taylor’s father as a customer, you can bet they lost the majority of his circle of influence as potential customers, most of which fit perfectly in their target demographic.
Calculating the Kindness Return on Investment
Unsure where to add a dose of kindness into your customer service policies? One place to start is to take a hard look at how much you risk by implementing customer-friendly policies.
What is the cost of providing a money-back guarantee to your product or service? How many customers would take you up on that offer? How many new customers would you gain because of it?
Imagine you are a furniture retailer, and your average margin is 40%. A customer claims a table they purchased was defective, and you refund the full value of $1000. You find out the customer actually broke the table, and you can’t recoup any of your money from the manufacturer. You are now out of pocket $600.
However, your policy has attracted several customers who only shop with you because of your generous return policy. They have encouraged their network of influence to start shopping at your store. In total, you conservatively estimate that your 2 most loyal customers have brought an additional 8 customers into your store throughout the year. To recover the money lost because of 1 dishonest customer, you only need to sell $1500 worth of additional furniture to those new customers. In fact, you are able to sell ten times that much, netting you $6000 in additional profit.
While you have lost $600 due to an unscrupulous customer, you have also gained $6000 in additional sales due to a generous and understanding return policy. You’ve treated your customers fairly, trusting that returns are based truly on defects. Since the policy is ironclad, it is much easier for your staff to know how to react when a customer wants to return a product. Where there was once suspicion, you now have kindness and compassion.
While such customer-friendly policies should always be applied within a specific business context, the principles of kindness should be universal. It is one of the few ways that SMEs can still differentiate themselves, and in some cases, truly distinguish themselves from their competitors. By stepping back and assessing the true cost of policy changes, you can see just how far you can go to accommodate your customers. You might be surprised by how generous you really can be!
Categories
Customer Service

The 10,000 Watt Spotlight on Customer (Dis)Satisfaction

The results of an interesting survey have just been released that provide some strong support for a diligent and consistent commitment to customer service. The survey is one of the first we have read showing the impact customer service has in terms of shaping a company’s online reputation.

It is worth reading the text of the full slide presentation to synthesize the full scope of the survey results. The company behind the survey is called RightNow, who describe themselves as ‘a provider of on demand customer service experience solutions’. Despite the intentions behind the survey, RightNow did team up with market opinion giant Harris Interactive to conduct the survey, so there is definitely merit in their findings.

For us, 3 findings jumped out:

  1. 95% of respondents to the survey have taken action over a negative customer experience, and 79% told others about it.
  2. 66% cited customer service as the biggest driver to encourage greater spending
  3. While 82% of respondents said they would not do business with a company after receiving bad customer service, 92% said they would consider returning if they were offered something to make amends.

With the ability to praise or criticize just a few clicks away, today’s consumers wield significant power to influence a brand. This is often cited as a reason why small businesses do not want to venture into the world of social media – they fear having negative comments associated with their company’s online presence. Yet this is precisely the reason why small companies should be implementing some form of social media strategy, as there has never been an easier or more powerful way to engage your customers.

At the Connecting with Customers Online forum we participated in last month, a small business owner asked why he should be concerned with connecting with customers online. He said he was doing just fine finding customers through traditional media, such as Yellow Pages ads and bulk mailers. The response from the panel was simple: your customer are already online talking about you, whether you are aware of it or not.

Having a forum to communicate with clients, whether it be through a blog, a Facebook fanpage, or via Twitter, allows small businesses to have rich dialogs not just with individuals, but with whole groups of customers. The number of customers who are comfortable using new technology is growing daily. These customers not only learn about products and services, but interact with them as well. They expect brands and companies to have an online presence, and have even higher expectations with regards to using the Internet to correspond with them.

By not paying attention to these customers, a small business risks losing not just potential business, but also the reputation-building mechanism these customers create. And if this mechanism isn’t working for you, it is surely working for your competitors. There is no better example of this than Homestars, which is a review site for homeowner services such as plumbers, electricians, eves-trough installers, etc.. The companies providing the best service rise to the top on the backs of positive customer reviews. Because the community around Homestars is so active, more people are using the site to find reliable vendors, which then spurs more reviews, which draws even more users to the site. The power of this community is why we recommend every contractor and tradesperson we deal with to start with a Homestars listing and start building their online reputation.

Not a contractor? There are many other ways to start getting comfortable with online customer engagement. The important thing to keep in mind is that building your brand online is about the discipline, not the tool. It doesn’t matter if you tweet, post, or flickr – it is the activity of reaching out and engaging that is most important. Start with one tool and get comfortable with it. Broadcast your blog or fanpage to as many people as possible and start developing a community around your brand. Even just 10 minutes a day is enough to start the ball rolling.

Don’t have 10 minutes a day? Worried that your online commitments will get in the way of your offline commitments? Talk to us to learn how tinybriefcase can help. We have a number of highly cost-effective ways to help small businesses engage their customers online.