Designer 43 - How Your Customer Service Affects Your Brand

designer, edition 43

Have you ever received crappy customer service? I'm guessing yes. Based on what I'm hearing from friends, family and clients, our province is in a serious customer service recession. My own experiences are becoming too numerous to count. And they're so bad they're almost funny.

Read my article on how customer service affects brand and some ideas for managing and maintaining customer service in your growing business.

Are you a fan of Social Media?

I must admit, contrary to the advice of all my favourite marketing gurus, I've been hesitant to jump on the social media bandwagon. I'm starting to get my feet wet (links below), but I'm still unsure as to how all of this will really benefit my business. Are you a fan of social media? Do you have a real life example of how Social Media has worked to your advantage? If so, I'd love to hear about it. Drop me a line at amy@mmm314.com and tell me about it. Any great stories I receive will be published in next months edition of "designer" along with a link to your social media accounts.

How's your customer service affecting your brand?

During the Olympic games, my husband and I went out to take in the much anticipated Canada vs Russia hockey game. Wing night at a pub in a community dubbed "Hockeyville" seemed like an obvious place to go. Were we wrong, was the game not on at 5:30 pm? No, that wasn't it. The problem was that we chose the one pub in Canada that was airing the curling between Great Britain and Scotland instead. It was only when enough patrons arrived in Canada jerseys (it was standing room only) and my husband had a small fit, that the waitress conceded and changed the channel to the game.

As a business owner, I was taking this all in from a customer service perspective. My only thought had been that the waitress with the remote MUST BE the owner of the pub and she must be independently wealthy. Turns out, the waitress was from Scotland and preferred the curling game to the hockey game and so it went.

Bottom line for me always comes down to one question: "Did they do what they said they were going to do?". In the case of the game, I had not seen any ads saying they would be airing the hockey game, so maybe it was unfair to assume, though in my defense, the small town we were in did run an ad campaign which dubbed them as "Hockeyville". Were the actions of Hockeyville's only pub in line with the town's branding efforts? I think not. And that's the lesson here - customer service is one of the key elements of your brand. This pub in "Hockeyville", bursting at the seams with jersey-clad hockey fans, took one giant step back in it's branding efforts by the action of its employee.

As a business owner, how can you prevent an employee from behaving badly? You can't. But what you can do is check in once in a while. Get customer feedback and invite your clients to report any dissatisfaction as soon as possible and then rectify the situation. While you cannot guarantee your staff, you can guarantee your customer satisfaction.

Here are some ideas for managing and maintaining customer service in your growing business:

Develop a mantra that resonates with your brand. For me, standing behind my word is #1, so I tell my support staff to "under promise and over deliver".
Do routine spot checks. If you're like me, you're hiring on the fly and you hardly have time to train let alone check up on workers on a regular basis. No matter how busy you are, take the time to evaluate your staff members. Put a system in place to make it easy, measurable and routine.
Be accessible. As you grow, you relinquish some control over how your customers are served on a day to day basis. You have to count on your clients to tell you when they are unhappy, so make it easy for them. Whether it's a direct phone number (not my first choice!) or your personal email, make sure they can get in touch with you directly and let them know that you welcome their feedback.
Qualify your customer. The customer may always be right but that doesn't mean they're right for you. If you've encountered a complainer (ie everything you're doing is wrong), tactfully "fire" the customer and move on. Not all customers are worth mollifying. Let's go back to the pub example. Had my husband and I shown up and requested that the waitress turn the channel to the season finale of "The Bachelor", she may have chosen to kindly refuse our request and cut her losses.
Advertise your "#1" and guarantee it. Wal-mart promises low prices, Safeway is the "Air Miles" grocer, Subway is fresh fast food - If you received anything less from any of these suppliers you'd be disappointed. Determine what your #1 is and develop a system to guarantee it. I tell customers they can count on me to do what I say I'm going to do, whether it mean meeting a deadline or keeping within a budget. I've built my business on referrals who are looking for this type of service. So what do you do when something goes wrong? Look for solutions not excuses and waive fees and/or offer credit to make sure your client understands that your word is worth something.
THINK BIG. You know the commercial that Bell ran during the Olympics, the "my dad's on Facebook?" - keep that in mind when you go about your daily transactions. As I witnessed the above mentioned issue with the waitress in the pub, I kept thinking how funny it would be if I recorded the transaction on my Blackberry and posted it on Facebook then Tweeted my friends and in real time we saw it appear as a Bell commercial on the TV screen at the pub. The point? Nearly every client has the ability to have this sort of reach. Scary, isn't it?