You have to have great customer service.
I’ve shared with you the three pillars of a business and you gotta do these three. You need to do all three really well.
- You need to attract customers.
- You have to sell to customers.
- You have to fulfill what it is you sold them.
In essence, that’s business broken down in a very simple way for you. For the third one, fulfillment, part of that is not only delivering what it is you sold them, but a customer element as well. That’s why you have customer service emails and phone numbers and things like that.
That’s why I’m still blown away by Amazon. They have the best customer service. You can call them on a Sunday. The people help you. They’re absolutely incredible. Every time I call them, I’m shocked by how good their customer service is considering their incredible volume, but they’ve perfected these three pillars of business; attraction, sales and fulfillment. They figured it out. Not only do they ship you the product fast, but they have an incredible customer service as well. It blows me away.
Here are five ways to dramatically improve customer service.
Define What the Perfect Customer Experience Looks Like
Define what the perfect customer experience looks like in your industry and what you’re selling.
I have a digital marketing company, and the one thing I shared with the co-founder and we got it started is what I wanted as the experience. He serviced our account for another business, and that’s what made us start the company. He did such an incredible job with our digital marketing about four or five years ago that I wanted to start a digital marketing company with him. I defined for him what I thought the perfect customer experience was. I told him, I didn’t want an email report at the end of the month. I wanted him to go over this with me and explain what it is he did for me in such a way that can understand what I spent this money on and what you did for that money. Then, I may be able to understand your reports if you do this with me three months in a row. The point that I wanted to make is that as a small business owner, I need to understand what it is you’re doing for me.
You need to explain it in a way that I know that I haven’t wasted my money. That was the perfect customer experience. I wanted this digital marketing company to be specifically designed for small business owners. We should be able to have phone calls with them and explain to them what it is we do and what we define the perfect experience as, and what we can handle in this location with this amount of people, the scale, the tipping point, etc.
I also own a construction company that has eight divisions. We have a completely different customer experience. Our customer experience definition is when you call or reach out to us, you’re goint to speak with someone knowledgeable. We’re going to get back with you within 24 hours. We’re going to send someone knowledgeable to come talk to you about anything it is you want. When we start your job, we start and we stay until we finish.
We honor what we put in the contract, and our goal is for you to have an incredible customer service experience and we give you a survey card at the end to see if we provided that.
Every business is different, but you need to define what the perfect customer experience would look like, or you’re never going provide it.
Get Customer Feedback
That’s why I do the survey card with the construction company. Every Monday we mail about countless survey cards. We handwrite these envelopes because we find we get back better responses and we only ask for five questions and we give them a $5 Starbucks coffee gift card for them to use. We give them a postcard that already has a stamp on it. It literally takes 15 seconds to fill this out. These get put on my desk.
We have tried online and it doesn’t work as well as mailing them directly. They like that we reach out to them.
Test Your Customer Service
You need to have a friend or a family member test your system and request customer service. They need to do the entire loop of what it is you sell and to try to reach back out with customer questions that would be typical in your industry and company. See how long it took for them to get a phone call, how long it took to get the product returned, refund credited to their account, etc. The entire process. See how long it actually took.
I’m telling you that it will humble you. I did this so much in the very in the first five years of my company. I asked everybody I met to get an estimate from our company and tell me what you thought. What did you think? What could we have done better? I wanted to get feedback. We’re trying to create the perfect customer experience, and I always figure if I can’t make you happy, you’re that very difficult person. I’ve told customers, if we can’t make you happy, you absolutely need to go. I encourage you to go work with one of my competitors.
Empower Your Employees
Empower your employees who make first contact with your customers to handle the situation whenever possible. At a minimum, this should be 90% of the time.
I tell you what I hate is when I’m on the phone with Comcast XFINITY and they gotta transfer me through three people for what is a basic question and that each person asked me the same darn question. They ask me the prompt, what’s my phone number, and then the next person is going to ask it when I speak to him, so I’m like, Why did I give it to the first person? That was a waste.
Empower your employees to handle as much customer interaction as humanly possible. There are two things I’m telling you in this. Empower your employees, which means you have to not only train them to know what a complaint looks like or a problem, but you have to empower them and give them the power to resolve it. Only then if they can’t solve it, then they take it to somebody above. Then, you want the person who has first contact with your customers to be able to solve it. Customers don’t like going two and three people deep. That’s just not efficient. So I gave you three incredible nuggets there. Train your employees to build and handle customer service, empower them and give them the authority to resolve it, and you want people that are making first contact to be able to handle it so that the customer doesn’t have to go three people.
Keep Score/Survey Your Customers
If you don’t keep score, you’re not going to know how you did. That’s why we do our survey cards. Those survey cards go on my desk as Moses brought the tablets down from Mount Sinai. Nobody touches those, not even my partners. When they come in, they go on my desk, and I go through them and then I put them on my partner’s desk. If there’s a problem or something I see, sometimes I reach out to a customer. Why? because I keep score.
So get surveys from your customers and confirm that you are providing great customer service. If you don’t take surveys or get customer feedback, you’re not going to know if you’re doing a great job.
