Are you going to copy Amazon in 2018 and deliver great customer service?
I suspect when December is over Amazon will have grown about $40 billion in 2017. Jeff Bezos, the founder, is now the wealthiest person in the world.
The Customer Experience is built around the first contact and last contact. In customer service you are dependent on people, your employees. Very few firms understand the value of high performing employees. The less we pay employees the less respect we have for them and therefore, the less we are willing to invest in them. So sad.
Customer service is having no dumb rules and policies. Making it easy to do business with you means you use technology to get closer to the customer not push them away. Most firms love IVR. This means you push one for English. Push two for Spanish and push 7 to go to HELL. A live person needs to answer the call in 1-3 rings if you have over 100 employees and it should be 24/7. Much less expensive than a physical location. These need to be your best people.
Speed is critical. Reduce the time it takes by 90%. That's speed. Most employees have a slow mindset and most organizations have too many policies and procedures that encourage… slow.
Do your employees treat every customer as special? Do they use the customer's name and remember it. Do they feel valued?
Price is a part of great service. Most firms have too much waste, too many dead employees. Amazon has great prices because it understands the power of price.
When someone in your firm screws up what is the service recovery? Most firms in the world have NO service recovery. Saying I am sorry is NOT Service Recovery. I teach 4 steps:
1. Act Quickly: No time to move the problem up the ladder
2. Take Responsibility: I can count on one hand how many times in my life I have heard an employee take responsibility
3. Be Empowered: Every employee has to solve the problem in 60 seconds or less for the magic to happen.
4. Compensate: Give products and services away that have high value/low cost.
Most organizations think they provide awesome customer service. Most consumers in the world feel there is no customer service. In the U.S. firms love surveys. They have never seen a survey they didn't like. The problem is few people respond to these surveys and most firms do nothing with the results. Surveys are now overkill. They turn customers off. Customer service and HR departments have convinced management that these are cool when they are really a waste of time and money.
If you want to make 2018 a great year with huge increases in revenue and dramatically reduce customer complaints I suggest the following.
1. Drive this as a strategy
2. Eliminate dumb rules and policies
3. Master empowerment
4. Practice Service Recovery
5. Dramatically increase speed for everything you do.
6. Have the best people in your call center and answer with live people 24/7 in 1-3 rings.
7. Train everyone on the skills and art of customer service with something new and fresh every 4 months. Make sure the programs are short and awesome. Great packaging and design are needed. Click here
