Christopher S. Penn : Awaken Your Superhero » Customer Service

Get the first cup on the table as fast as possible

Christopher S Penn — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:41:10 +0000

This morning, John Wall and I were discussing the merits and drawbacks of the diner in which we do Marketing Over Coffee each week.

One of the hallmarks of good service at a restaurant is that things initially happen at a rapid pace. You get seated quickly and your first order of drinks or appetizers is taken quickly. If you run a tight shop with great service, you get that first cup of coffee/drink/appetizer on the table as soon as possible.

Why? Because up until the point that goods and services are actually delivered, it’s really easy for the customer to walk out. There’s no check to pay because nothing of value has been delivered. Once that first cup is on the table, you have now created a legal and social obligation between you and the customer. If they walk out, they now must pay for the goods and services already rendered.

If you want to sell more, if you want to get more out of your marketing and sales efforts, try getting the first order on the table as soon as possible. Deliver at top speed. Get the commitment, even if it’s something as meager as a cup of coffee, and you’ll be on your way to bigger business opportunities.

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The most powerful customer service secret of all

Christopher S Penn — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:03:24 +0000

The simplest and most powerful customer service secret of all: tell your customers what’s going on.

Or better yet, give them the ability to tell themselves.

Refer back to my joyful travelogue recently. The #1 thing the airline could have done to make everyone’s wait easier would have been to provide more timely information.

If I could have checked a visual status board, I could have at my convenience and known whenever I wanted what was happening with my flight. The Type A personalities who were shouting at the gate agents on the rare occasions that they were available could have instead compulsively checked the board every 15 seconds.

If I never have to guess what’s going on, my imagination never has to cook up imagined slights against me. I never have to believe that your employees are lazy or uncaring.

If you’ve got a server down or a datacenter experiencing problems, show a status dashboard. Heck, put up a webcam so that customers can see employees working (assuming you have good looking, hard working employees, of course). If you’ve got shipping delays, let people see that information and make it as clear as possible what’s happening. Google, for example, does this brilliantly:

Don’t believe there’s a demand for that information? Go check the iOS or Android app stores for status apps.

I paid for this flight tracking app.

You’ll find people paying good money for third party apps to keep an eye on you. Better that you provide the service, don’t you think?

Tell people what’s going on, provide them with the best available information, and you’ll earn much more customer loyalty and retention.

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First steps on the path to exceptional

Christopher S Penn — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 11:49:52 +0000

The path to becoming exceptional is relatively simple to get started on. In a world that has generally accepted mediocrity, if not outright failure, finding a few parts of your business to improve that will push you past your competitors is simple.

It starts with listening to yourself. Consider all of the complaints people have about your business and the businesses of others with whom you’re competing. Pay attention to the simplicity of the golden rule: that which is hateful to you, do not do to someone else.

Here’s an exercise to try right now. Get something to write with and a few moments of quiet. Ask yourself about the last five bad customer experiences you’ve had. What did you really hate? What stuff got you so riled up, so full of anger that you swore you’d never do business with that company again if you could help it? What did the company or companies specifically do to fail so hard?

If you can’t think of any for some strange reason, I’ll give you this starter list of companies that generally get people frothing with rage:

Airline travel
Retail customer service
Banking
Phone, Cable & Internet service provider technical support
Government agencies

Got a good list of all the ways a company can fail you?

Now audit your own company, your own department, your own work for those failures and stop doing them.

If you hate that clerks at government agencies treat you with outright hostility at having to actually work, then fire people in your own company who behave the same way with startling speed.

If you hate that airlines lie like rugs and try every possible avenue to reduce expenses without caring how miserable it makes their customers, don’t do that to your customers.

If you go ballistic with every nickel and dime charge on your cell phone bill or every banking fee that banks can dream up, stop trying to cleverly milk your own customers for the same short term profit.

If you can’t stand calling for technical support and getting someone overseas who has never seen the product in their life and can’t possibly care less about actually helping you, then spare the extra expense by investing in support for your products and services.

If you can eliminate the things that you hate in other companies at your own company, you’ve taken a first and most important step towards becoming exceptional. You’ve removed the very worst parts of your company like cutting the line on a boat anchor tied to your ankle. You still have a lot of swimming to do, but now you’re at least not actively trying to drown yourself.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

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Does your company care? Do you?

Christopher S Penn — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:06:35 +0000

While in the airport yesterday perusing a variety of marketing materials (aka billboards as I walked to my gate), I saw a bunch of different advertisements by companies about how much they care, from facility maintenance to oil to the airlines themselves. This inspired a late afternoon tweet:

If all your marketing materials insist that you care, you probably don’t.

Within a few minutes, Sophia asked the very on-point question:

brightwings: @cspenn curious. what would demonstrate “caring” to your way of thinking & satisfaction?

Caring is one of those terms that falls under the same category as cool. Saying that you care is far less impactful than actually caring.

What is caring? It’s hard to define but easy to spot. Take your pick of any of the things that people at companies do, from your local favorite restaurant server remembering the way you like your martini to an airline flight attendant doing the mandatory preflight announcement slightly differently:

Not caring is even easier to see. It’s business as usual, paying lip service to the idea that the people giving you money as customers might actually matter, and putting yourself before your customers. I worked for a company once where I watched as a customer service representative was told – in all seriousness – to care less, answer the phones more quickly, get the customer off the phone more quickly and get them to buy something online, and avoid helping them in order to maintain call volume, because phone calls cost money.

Caring isn’t a corporate directive that marketing can create from thin air, much as we might try or want to. Caring comes from a company’s corporate culture at every level, from the CEO to the janitor.

Maybe you’re in charge of a company, a department, a workgroup, and you want to evolutionize (note the missing letter R) the culture into one that cares. How do you do that? Take whatever it is you’re doing and reframe it as a mission. Not a B-school mission statement, but a real mission, a holy cause, a calling. Find or create a noble aspect to whatever it is you do, something that you can truly be passionate, even zealous about, and recenter your focus on that.

Sales will get easier because you will exude the subtle, powerful confidence that comes from speaking about something you believe in. Customer service will get easier because your customers will align to your beliefs or choose a different company to work with. Marketing will get much easier because you will rarely have to question whether the work you are doing is effective or not – you just have to determine if it is in line with your mission. Running the company itself will get easier because you won’t have to browbeat workers into coming to work or doing good work. The cause and the passion it fuels will do that for you; you need to maintain, encourage, and foster that faith, remaining true to your mission.

What demonstrates caring? When you have something to believe in and something worth fighting for, caring demonstrates itself.

What’s your mission?

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The problem with premium

Christopher S Penn — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:57:34 +0000

Starbucks.

Apple.

Maglite.

Dom Perignon.

All of these are premium brands, yes? They conjure up certain images, certain feelings, certain associations, all of which their respective marketing departments have worked hard to establish over the years. Premium denotes quality of product or service above average, a product you can aspire to as a consumer…

… unless you’re in the middle of a brutal recession. Suddenly, premium becomes a boat anchor around your leg as consumers seek out thrift, value, cost-conscious… cheap.

Sometimes premium can override cost concerns – the old “quality costs less in the long run” hack – but sometimes, it will just kill you.

As a marketer, think carefully about how your brand will be perceived in good times and in bad. Is there a brand association durable enough that it’s appropriate no matter what the economic climate is? Can you play the trend of the day in your communications while staying true to your core value proposition?

Here’s a tip: invest, invest, invest in your customer service, and by that I don’t just mean your call center, I mean every employee in your company. Service costs money, absolutely, but great service endures good times and bad.

When times are good, people love the personal touch and are willing to spend more for great service. When times are bad, people want to stretch the dollar as far as it can go, and if your product or service has value and can be backed up with great service (think a warranty w/a toll free number that humans answer on the second ring), you will endure when everyone else goes out of business.

Great customer service pays huge dividends. You can get more return out of great service than all the PR in the world, because in the uber-connected 2.0 world where everything is online and simultaneously service nearly everywhere borders on abusive, your great service will be worth talking about.

Great service, in other words, is a premium, a premium that will lend a shine to your brand no matter what’s happening in the world – and that’s worth paying for.

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It's the little things that matter

Christopher S Penn — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:29:51 +0000

At the recent NASFAA conference, I was wandering around Epcot after sessions one day, and noticed this in the International Gateway:

This is on the side of a bridge at the France pavilion facing the boat dock. Maybe 1 in 100 visitors to Epcot will actually see the side of the bridge from this angle, yet Disney saw fit to put a small easel with a half finished boat dock painting and a bicycle on this little ledge.

This is exactly what I’d expect to see on the banks of the Seine.

This is why Disney is the master of the experience. We all strive to deliver an experience of some kind to our customers. Sometimes we even deliver a remarkable experience. Disney takes it to the next level by providing layered experiences so that, for those looking for breaks in the illusion, they find instead reinforcements of the experience.

What would your sales and marketing look like if at every turn, your customers’ experiences were reinforced, rather than diminished?

This is something that came up in a roundabout way at the MITX panel discussion today that I had the pleasure of being a part of, along with Aaron Strout, Chris Brogan, and Brian Halligan, in a discussion of what makes great design.

Great design is more than just sales and marketing. Great design is emotion. When you pick up an iPod, when you look at a beautiful car, it inspires an emotional, visceral response. Your rational mind catches up later, but with great design, you feel it first.

Disney’s touches – which could have been omitted – demonstrate great design, because their attention to detail creates that emotional response. You FEEL like you’re in Paris, or what you’d imagine Paris is like.

I strive in my own work to eventually achieve Imagineer-like skills. Not there yet, but working harder at it.

How do you perceive design? How important are the little things to you?

Buy me a cookie, dude – Marriott Customer Survey

Christopher S Penn — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:53:06 +0000

I got this email just today from Marriott about my stay in Washington, DC.

To the Marriott folks:

Look, no offense, but I’m not going to take your survey. You’ve already got my money, and now you want my time in return for nothing at all. Come on, offer me something, even just something token, to acknowledge that you know this survey will be a drain on my time and probably won’t benefit me in any way.

What kind of offer? Heck, I’d settle for something like “We’ll leave a free cookie on your pillow the next time you stay at a Marriott property if you take this survey. To be perfectly honest, it’ll probably be a little stale since it will have been in the lobby the day before, but at least it’s a free cookie in exchange for the survey. Pretty please?”

Also, I don’t know about you, but when I hit reply, it should go to J. W. Marriott, Jr. If it doesn’t, then don’t sign the letter from him. I’d rather you give me a reply-to and a letter addressed to Florence Attleby, Customer Service Intern, 14th Floor, Marriott Customer Service, Cubicle 87 behind the laser printer, NY, NY 11001.

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Turnaround: Who has exceptional customer service?

Christopher S Penn — Sat, 26 May 2007 22:33:27 +0000

Still steamed about US Airways, but I made a ninja play and we’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, let me ask you this:

Who has exceptionally good customer service? What are the absolute BEST customer service experiences you’ve ever had that immediately destroyed the competitors’ chances of winning you over?

US Airways Customer Service Sucks

Christopher S Penn — Sat, 26 May 2007 12:26:51 +0000

This would be funny if it wasn’t me.

I’d booked Flight 1091 at 6:30 AM out of Boston to Dayton, Ohio for the Stephen K. Hayes Full Moon of May meditation seminar. Everything seemed fine – e-ticket booked, confirmation email received (Travel Confirmation: B4P74G, ticket 03721357878361, passenger name Christopher Penn in case anyone from US Airways eventually reads this), etc. I get to Logan Airport this morning an hour and change before my flight is supposed to depart, great. Get to the self-service counter to check in, and the machine says, “No seats could be found for this reservation number. Please try again.” A couple more tries of this, and the machine finally spits back, “No seats could be found for this reservation number. Please see an agent at the booking counter.”

Of course, being Memorial Day weekend, the lines were on the long side, so after a 40 minute wait in line (getting really worried because the flight’s leaving SOON), I see an agent who brusquely tells me, “I’m sorry, we have no record of your reservation.”

[insert profanity here]

After expressing things internally, I said, “Okay, so there’s no ticket even though I booked one. When’s the next flight to Dayton?”

“4:30 PM, getting in at 9 PM.”

Not much good that will do me, since the 2 day seminar begins at 1 PM and concludes the first day at 9 PM. I head home after cancelling a bunch of reservations and calling my teacher to let him know briefly of the foul-up.

When I got home, my wife urged me to call the airline and get a refund. So I called them up – 480-693-6735. The audio voice response unit kept telling me to submit a refund request online, and then when I queued up to speak to a customer service agent, the helpful prompt said, “Due to unexpectedly high call volume, your estimated wait time is 47 minutes.”

I bailed out of there, unwilling to wait 3/4 of an hour on the phone, and instead headed online to submit an electronic refund request. Here’s the email response I got:

Thank you for submitting your refund request via e-mail. We are experiencing an increase in customer e-mail and are working diligently to respond to all inquiries; however it could take between 45 and 60 days to review your request. If this schedule will not provide a timely response, please contact our Refund Department directly at 480-693-6735. When calling, please have your 13-digit ticket number beginning with either 037 or 401 available.

Your refund request is subject to additional audit and final approval by the US Airways Refund Department. All refunds are credited to the form of payment of the original ticket.

Thank you for choosing US Airways.

I’m sorry, 45 to 60 DAYS to review an email? I could send the email by carrier pigeon one word at a time faster than that.

Needless to say, I’m beyond pissed at US Airways for terminally poor customer service, and on top of that, I don’t anticipate getting a refund without a struggle, which I’m not looking forward to.

I’m most amused by the closer: Thank you for choosing US Airways. Yeah, that’s a mistake I won’t make again.

US Airways, and any airline that’s currently worried about staying in business, here’s a tip: if your business is in trouble, improving the quality of your customer service is the only thing that will save you. Take your entire marketing budget – all of it – and dump it all into customer service, because frankly, that’s where you need the most help. Pay your staff to not be surly, or hire people who aren’t surly, figure out a way to communicate with customers that doesn’t involve hold times approaching geological epochs, and make your damn computers work correctly.

Here’s my last bit of petty revenge. According to the web site, the customer service fax number is 800-892-3447.

FAX: 800-892-3447

I hope junk fax spam bots send you Caribbean vacation offers endlessly. May the junk faxes and scams all use US Airways to book their fraudulent, non-existant offers.
us airways
usairways
us air
usair
customer service
customerservice

Epilogue: US Airways eventually extended me a credit for the flight… and a $150 fee to use it. #!@# you, US Airways. I’m glad to see this post is #4 when you Google US Airways customer service.

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