For people making payroll, by people making payroll
For people making payroll, by people making payroll
September 5th, 2009
New companies that want to succeed based on really great service have always started at a disadvantage.
The disadvantage is you can’t really advertise that. You can claim to offer great service in your ads, but since everyone else says it, too, nobody has reason to believe you.
You see, you have to prove you provide great service before people will be willing to choose you on that basis. Proving how good your service really is to a customer only takes one opportunity. But proving it to your whole marketplace takes a long, long time.
Conditioned Air has been in business for 5 1/2 years, and focused on superior customer service the whole time. That’s been great for our customers (our customer turnover rate is very low for our industry). Yet after all that time, not nearly enough people know about us. We add new customers daily, but the vast majority of people in our market still haven’t had a chance to try us out.
Many service businesses focus on bringing in as many new customers as possible, as fast as possible. They have to constantly rush new customers in the front door by hook or crook, since their current customers are escaping out the back door the first chance they get because the service is bad.
If you really do offer great service, you don’t lose as many customers, and don’t have to spend as much money acquiring new customers to replace the ones fleeing. In the long run, it’s a great strategy to build a large and loyal customer base.
But the short- and medium-term problem remains: how is a prospective customer to know how good your service really is until they try you? And if your main competitive advantage is great service, how do you convince them to give you a shot?
How does anyone know who actually delivers and who doesn’t? Personal recommendations are great. But relying on traditional word-of-mouth is tough, because a good reputation spreads slowly and unevenly that way.
Now along comes Angie’s List, what I consider the Amazon book ranking of the service industry. I buy a lot from Amazon – pretty much any time I plan to buy something, I check them first. One big reason is the helpful customer reviews (for an example, see one of my favorite business books). They’ve helped me see through advertising and hype many times.
That’s what Angie’s List does for service companies. What you see there are raw customer opinions about thousands of contractors. Conditioned Air can’t influence the wording, can’t pay to change anything to make us look better. About all any company can do is offer a discount coupon or pay a small amount to be highlighted within their ranking. But if a customer is unhappy with the service they got and gives them a low ranking, it’s there for the world to see. Here is how it looks:
[September 2009 - removed screen shot of Conditioned Air's current rating due to this email from Angie's List Brand Enforcement Coordinator: Thanks for the write up in your online article and for sharing it with us! I am happy to pass along the online article to our PR department, but I also want to follow up with you in regards to Angie’s List brand guidelines. We appreciate your commitment to excellent customer service and your presence as an advertiser on our list. While we hope that high ratings on Angie’s List are a mark of pride for both business owners and employees, we must still monitor how service providers promote this recognition in order to maintain the value of our brand.
Angie’s List Brand Enforcement primarily follows up with those that have unauthorized references to the Angie’s List trademarked name or logo on their company websites and online listings or advertisements. We understand service providers want to promote their inclusion on Angie’s List, and we do make some allowances to reference Angie’s List on social networking websites such as blogs, Twitter and in this case, an article. In general, Angie’s List name can be referenced in postings, but we do not allow companies to reference ratings because these ratings may be accurate one day, but not the next. Additionally, Angie’s List does not authorize duplication of website content, which is copyrighted.
Angie’s List asks that the screen shot of a ratings page from our private member website is removed from the article. I included a screen shot of the article below for your reference. We ask that this change is made by the end of the next week (Sept. 18), to meet compliance within Angie’s List brand guidelines.
Thank you for your time and the opportunity to clarify Angie’s List brand guidelines. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you ever have questions about our guidelines. I would be happy to assist you.]
Does that mean Conditioned Air gets nothing but A ratings? No, any business will eventually have some unhappy customers. But for the real customer service pros, the unhappy few will be drowned out by the many positive reviews. And what you will see is a bunch of unbiased, detailed customer opinions that you can read to decide who to hire.
How cool is that? I love it because it lets us shine through our customer’s words, not our own. It sorts out the pretenders, even the ones spending lavishly on huge Yellow Page and constant media ads. There is no hiding bad service in the Angie’s List world.
As the world gets more and more connected, and information gets more easily accessible by the people who need it, I think we are going to see lots of inefficiencies like this go away. No more having to just try some contractor (or dentist or doctor or car dealer) based on one or two data points (or much worse, their advertising budget). You’ll now be able to instantly see what people just like you have received from whomever you are thinking of using.
I say it’s about time!
Popularity: 60% [?]
Tags: Angie's List, customer retention, ranking
Posted in Customer Service, Marketing and Selling | Comments Off
August 31st, 2009
One of Conditioned Air’s customers sent us a nice thank-you letter. A couple of months later I was talking to him, and he mentioned he was a tad disappointed that we hadn’t followed up with him.
In our business we want to look for any reason to “touch” the customer. The more we are in contact with a customer, the more opportunities they have to see what kind of company we are.
So I went to each of our office staff and explained that anytime we have an opportunity to touch a customer, we need to seize it:
Sit down right now and write down five different opportunities you have to “touch” your customers. Then train your staff and follow up to make sure they are taking advantage of every opportunity.
Popularity: 40% [?]
Posted in Customer Service | Comments Off
August 3rd, 2009
When I wrote the Top 10 Reasons to choose Conditioned Air Solutions, the one I may have been the most passionate about was #6 – “we want your feedback”.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that whenever I get great service I usually find that I have an easy way to give the business feedback. I recently visited Sweet Peppers Deli for the first time and it was great! Friendly people, clean place, great food, excellent service…and sure enough, a postage paid comment card on each table with plenty of room for me to tell them as much or as little as I liked. And just as sure, on Ryan’s not-so-positive eating experience a while back, there was no card for him to fill out.
“That’s great”, you may be thinking, “but how do I do that for my business?” That’s why we’re here today: to see exactly how you can start getting regular feedback from your customers. I’m going to show you how both Sweet Peppers (from my customer perspective) and Conditioned Air (from my business owner perspective) do it, and some of the thinking behind that.
Both start with an old fashioned tool: a post card. Let’s take a look at Sweet Peppers’:
Note a few important things while you think about what you want to ask your own customers:
I’m not sure how this could be much easier for me as a customer, and that’s critical: the easier it is for them, the more feedback you’ll receive.
Now let’s look at Conditioned Air’s:
The first thing you may notice is the differences in the cards that are driven by the differences in our businesses. When we designed our card, some of our goals were general and some specific to our business:
If you think you need something like this for your business, here is exactly how to implement your own customer feedback system in the form of a post card. But first, a warning: if you do this halfway you’ll do more damage than good. If you don’t have the ability to regularly deliver the cards to your customers, or if you can’t consistently follow up on any negative comments, or if you aren’t able (or willing) to actually take the feedback to heart and make changes, then don’t do it. But if you can do these things, then here we go:
This isn’t rocket science, but it does require a bit of organization, discipline, and a desire to get better. If you have those you can have a steady way to improve both your customer relations and your performance.
Popularity: 100% [?]
Posted in Customer Service, Marketing and Selling | 3 Comments »
July 7th, 2009
When I arrived in London last week I was curious to find how I’d be treated over here and the short answer is, well, marvelously! From the people helping me find my way on The Tube to the helpful curator of the courthouse in Warwick (and his lovely wife!) to Jo and Sharon, who run Coffee, Eats & Treats, a wonderful little eatery on Beaconsfield Road in Farnham Common, just west of London.
Jo and Sharon are great examples of what I mean by a business being nice. When my friends and I walked in these delightful ladies were all smiles and helpfulness. They didn’t care whether we were from England or America or Timbuktu, they just wanted to help us; wanted us to enjoy ourselves. Simply calling them nice would be my lame attempt at British understatement. Even when the 4-year-old in our party spilled her Slushie on the floor they exclaimed “Oh, those things happen!” and cheerfully cleaned it up.
Sharon (l) & Jo
Everything about them made me like them and want to come back, and I doubt that’s by accident. I’ll go out of my way to eat here every time I’m in London – I feel like I now have friends that I simply must visit when I can!
How is it with your business? Do people walk out the door dying to come back, vowing never to, or just not caring?
Popularity: 64% [?]
Posted in Customer Service | 1 Comment »
July 5th, 2009
There’s been a bit of kerfuffle lately about Kindle and DRM (see part 1 and part 2, though you can mostly skip part 1).
Megan McArdle wrote:
This is why customer service matters. It’s often the first thing to be cut by companies, because bad customer service doesn’t show up anywhere on the bottom line. Not until much later, and not very clearly even then. But I’m willing to bet they’ll lose substantial sales to people who see the first post, but not the second.
I won’t rant here about why DRM is evil. But Amazon has no excuse for not anticipating people’s concern over it. Recall that “DRM-free” was one of Amazon’s biggest talking points when they launched the Amazon MP3 store in 2007. So the lame excuse Dan received that “we’ve never run into this problem before” and that it was “a training glitch” ring hollow.
So Amazon is getting a lot of juicy bad publicity and unwanted attention to the power DRM gives publishers over stuff customer thought they’d bought on their Kindles. Whether it’s a good policy or bad, whether DRM is evil or great, doesn’t really matter in this respect. Amazon screwed up and let a little tempest be stirred up because they didn’t anticipate awkward questions and train their people how to answer them.
By the time you’ve been in business for a week or so, you’ll have done something a customer didn’t like. I can say this with confidence, because some customers don’t like anything. They don’t want to pay for what they buy, they expect you to deliver it to their house, and they think you should mow their yard while you’re there. Anything less is just poor service, in their minds.
You can’t please everybody all the time (though you should still make that your ideal). As you build your business, you’ll eventually put in place some policy that restricts what a customer (or employee) can do, and they’re not going to like it. But you can make it much worse if you haven’t explained clearly to everyone in your employ what the policy actually is, and how to respond to questions.
I see companies — even large, well-run companies like Amazon — apparently taken by surprise when people don’t like new restrictions placed on them. And frequently the companies’ first response makes it worse by obfuscating, denying, hesitating, or lying about it. If you’re going to do it, do it, be clear about what and why, and don’t dodge. If it turns out to be a mistake, don’t dither and hedge and pretend, just apologize, fix it, and move on.
Clear and honest communication won’t make everyone happy, and it won’t turn a good policy into a bad one. But fuzzy or bad or dishonest communication will make any policy seem worse than it is, and will turn an annoyed customer into an outraged former customer.
Popularity: 62% [?]
Posted in Customer Service | Comments Off
July 4th, 2009
Bad customer service has always been a hot button of mine. Maybe I’m just getting old and crotchety but it seems like it has recently spiraled out of control. Poor service, poor attitude, poor manners – people screw up all the time and don’t even have the courtesy to say they are sorry.
Don’t let your employees do this! Teach them to use the two simple words “I’m sorry!” – and mean them! This will make a big difference in how your customers deal with your mistakes. It’s pretty simple really:
If you forget to call someone back, just say you are sorry!
If you take too long to do something, just say you are sorry!
If you totally ruin someone’s house and they have to stay in a hotel for a week while you repair it, just (really, really, really) say you are sorry
If a customer sends you an email and you don’t see it for a week, jump on it immediately, and just say you are sorry. Don’t pretend you didn’t make the mistake, and don’t think that because they don’t rake you over the coals it must not have meant anything to them; I assure you it did.
I’m amazed at how people forget to return my call, don’t deliver something they promised, or take three times longer than their estimate, but don’t bother to say “I’m sorry!” If delivered from the heart, these are just flat out magic words. I find they quench the fire of my frustration nearly every time.
At Conditioned Air, we encourage our people to bend over backwards to give any non-abusive, honest customer the benefit of the doubt, often accompanied by those magic words. And then we make it right (how we do that obviously depends on the situation). You should do the same: encourage your people to admit their mistakes to your customers and then fix them.
Ah, you say, but what about abusive, nasty, mean-spirited customers? Well, if you messed up, say you are sorry. And if they really are abusive, stop doing business with them. You can’t control their attitude, only your own.
Of course, being sorry isn’t enough in and of itself. If you screw up constantly, you are going to have a hard time keeping customers no matter how much you apologize (I doubt it would make much difference in Ryan’s breakfast example from the other day). But if you deliver a decent product or service, a little humility and the appropriate apology will do wonders for your customer relationships.
Popularity: 73% [?]
Tags: Customer Relationships, Customer Service, magic words
Posted in Customer Service, Employees | 1 Comment »
June 30th, 2009
Recently my family and I ate breakfast at a local “Southern hospitality” restaurant.
It’s a smallish, quaint, intimate place. Plaques on the wall talk about “southern etiquette”, and promise great, friendly service. The menu assures that it’s all about family and friendliness. You’ve probably been somewhere like it; all these places are unique in pretty much the same way.
One of the owners (whom we know) is there frequently, and is always friendly. He was there this time, but busy, busy, busy, so he hurried in and out of the dining area on missions unknown.
Our waitress arrived to take our order. Daughter asked if they had apple juice. Waitress said, “No.” Then she waited. Daughter asked for orange juice. Waitress nodded, still didn’t say anything.
I pointed to the menu where it said ‘apple juice’ and asked, “Are you just out of apple juice, or do you not carry it any more?”
She said, “We don’t have apple juice.” Right. Got it. No apple juice. No “Sorry, we ran out,” or “Sorry, we haven’t updated the menu,” not even a smile for the 9-year-old who wanted apple juice but is out of luck. Nothing. Not openly hostile, you understand, she just didn’t care.
The place wasn’t crowded, and our breakfast wasn’t complicated. But when it arrived, there were several things wrong. Son ordered a sausage, egg and cheese sandwich, minus egg. What came out was sausage and egg, minus cheese. He ordered hash browns, which he never got. Wife ordered a side of bacon that never showed. Both daughters ordered hash browns; they got grits.
Plus the grits were cold.
OK, it sounds like I’m just whining about my breakfast, but that’s not the point. I know people screw up and have bad days. I’ve been in the food business, and I know consistent service is hard to deliver.
But we’ve eaten here before, and this was only a little worse than normal. The service varies from competent to bad; occasionally one of the wait staff is friendly, but that’s the exception.
The worst part is the owner doesn’t seem to know, though he’s there a lot. He can’t follow every member of his staff around, table by table, and see what they’re doing. But whatever he’s doing to get customer feedback isn’t working.
My wife (bless her heart) was mortified at my offer to tell him. But I was only thinking about it as one business owner to another: I wanted to help him by giving him valuable information I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have.
I’m certain the owners really mean what those nice plaques say. It matters to them that the breakfast named after him on the menu (he apparently eats like I do, though he’s not fat, curse his superior genes!) comes out in a variety of inappropriate ways. I know he wouldn’t like inattentive service or careless food preparation.
Yet the service was bad, I was unhappy, and I’m unlikely to go back — and the owner will never know. This scares me to death, and it should scare you to death.
Do you know — really know — what experience employees are giving your customers?
Unless you’re the sole employee, how do you know whether your customers are getting the level of service you promised them?
How do you know what your employees are telling people by their actions and their attitude? Can you attach video recorders to every employee’s head and then review the tapes nightly?
We’ll be blogging here about some ways to deal with this. But I’d like to hear from you: how do you work to insure your customers get the experience you want them to have, even when you can’t be there? How do you find out when they didn’t, and what do you do about it?
Tell me in the comments, because we’re looking for good ideas, too.
Popularity: 74% [?]
Posted in Customer Service | 2 Comments »
