Scott Jeffrey » customer service

Every Customer Touch Point Matters

Scott Jeffrey — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:00:59 +0000

Every interaction your brand has with your customer is important. Each point of contact (or touch point) provides your brand with the opportunity to strength your customer’s tie with you. Conversely, if you’re not careful, any touch point can damage your customer relationship.

A blaring example is the growing call center industry. Why invest in full-salary employees with benefit packages for in-house customer service reps when you can outsource to India at a fraction of the cost?

Here’s why: Not only are you going to frustrate your customers and weaken your relationship with them, you are going to lose a precious opportunity to strengthen your customer’s commitment to your brand.

Plus, you make it easy for your competition to steal your market share:

Online retailer Zappos has grown by a staggering annualized growth rate of 7,800% over the past 8 years, growing sales to over $1 billion. Its stellar in-house customer service team provides a powerful competitive advantage.
L.L. Bean has always been known for world-class customer service. I’ve been a loyal customer for over a decade and can attest to the fact that I’ve never waited on hold for more than a few seconds. You automatically get a knowledgeable customer service reps who is also an L.L. Bean Brand Lover.
DVD-by-mail provider Netflix has dominated the industry they invented and their online customer service, rated #1 by Nielsen Online, has helped them grow to almost 10 million subscribers. Realizing that their savvy customers prefer addressing customer service issues online, Netflix has anticipated virtually every potential issue and set up easy and quick ways to solve customer problems.

Every touch point matters. Your call center is just one touch point, but it’s a big one. Your website, advertising and packaging—everything you do either reflects your brand and strengthens your customer’s bond, or weakens it.

The Willingness to Genuinely Serve Your Customers

Scott Jeffrey — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:00:12 +0000

People “get” what you’re feeling—consciously or not. If you don’t really care about your customers, they’ll be the first ones to know.

Great brands don’t just create meaningless slogans like “Customer Service Excellence”—they champion customer-centric values as a way of operating every aspect of their business.

These businesses excite us and make us happy to conduct business with them. It’s a symbiotic relationship between business and customer. The business provides products and services customers need and, in turn, the customers willingly patronize the business and support its existence.

Have many companies forgotten about the nature of business itself?

Outstanding businesses go above and beyond to better their customers’ lives:

L.L. Bean wants you to be completely satisfied with your purchase. Don’t like the way a shirt holds up after a few years of use? Return it—L.L. Bean has no time limit on customer satisfaction.
Online retailer Zappos offers free shipping both ways and a 365-day return policy.
Along with one-click shopping, Amazon offers a Prime program that gives customers free 2-day shipping on most items and their Subscribe and Save feature offers both convenient and economical shopping.
In addition to creating beautifully-designed products, Apple supports their Mac User Groups (MUGs) and Genius Bar to help educate their customers on how to better use their Apple products.
Harley-Davidson sponsors HOG groups around the world and annual mega-rally events.
Search and online advertising giant Google offers a robust offering of free services that help their customers in their daily lives from Google Reader, Google-411, Desktop Search, Google Earth, News Alerts, Google Calendar and Google Docs.

What does your business do to better serve its customers?

How Do You Achieve a 62,400% Growth Rate?

Scott Jeffrey — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:00:59 +0000

Do you think it’s possible to go from under $2 million in sales to over $1 billion in less than a decade? What would it take? How would you do it?

You can’t do it if you use common thinking. You can’t do it by throwing gobs of money at an advertising budget. (Anyone remember Pets.com?)

You have to be smart, strategic and visionary. You have to adopt core values and live by them. You have to cultivate a culture that perpetuates those values. Most importantly, you have to excite your customers and cultivate loyalty to your brand.

Online retailer Zappos, led by CEO Tony Hsieh, went from $1.6 million in sales in 2000 to over $1 billion in sales this past year. What started out as an online shoe retailer is quickly morphing into a mega-retail clothing powerhouse. How did they do it?

Zappos’s tag line “Powered by Service” says it all. Zappos’s commitment to provide the best online shopping experience has led to a series of unique decisions designed to foster customer loyalty:

To execute hyper fast order fulfillment, their fulfillment center operates 24/7.
To ensure consistent fulfillment execution, they house all items in their warehouse (no drop shipping from outside sources).
To take the risk of shopping online away from their customers, Zappos offers free shipping both ways. (To my knowledge, they were the first to do so.)
To wow their customers and add the element of surprise, (Principle #7 in Why We Talk) they upgrade most orders to overnight or two-day shipping for free.
To meet their customers’ diverse needs, they offer a staggering selection of over 1,000 brands and over 200,000 styles.
To truly be “Powered by Service” their customer service staff goes through a five week training on the Zappos culture, core values and customer service protocol (including sending customers to their competitor’s websites on occasion).
To ensure friendly, helpful staff aligned with the Zappos culture, they offer new hires $2,000 after the first week of training to leave the program if it’s not a good “fit.” (According to Hsieh, this saves them money in the long run.)
To fulfill their customer’s higher human needs, Tony Hsieh is committed to delivering happiness to his customers.

I can keep going with this list. Zappos does a lot of things right (which helps explain why Jeff Bezos/Amazon.com just bought them). All of these attributes contribute to 75% of their sales coming from repeat customers.

What are the benefits of loyalty? Retention, more repeat business and positive word of mouth (customers create new customers for you). These are the ingredients needed to achieve a 62,400% growth rate.

Our Obsession with “New”

Scott Jeffrey — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:00:02 +0000

Our culture has a love affair with all things New. The latest news, music, books, products, programs, clothes and scandals—our obsession with new things drives the economy.

Did we choose to become obsessed with new? Not really.

There are two main drivers in this insatiable obsession. The first culprit is our animal brain, also called the limbic system. The animal brain is designed to scour the environment—to be on the look out for predators, prey and mates. The animal brain quickly detects what’s new or different in a familiar surrounding as a means of survival.

The second culprit is modern media. We have become programmed to believe that new equals better. Fashion, technology, automobiles and academic theories—every industry is susceptible to the “new” programming.

One example of “new mania” is the massive adoption of automated telephone systems and outsourced call centers. Businesses flock to these outsourced services in droves to achieve immediate cost savings. But what impact does this “new” option have on customer attrition rates and loyalty? Strong companies like L.L. Bean and Zappos have competitive advantages because they ignore the new trend and employ highly-trained, in-house customer service representatives.

The field of psychology provides another clear example. The new is heralded in terms like statistical relevance and evidenced-based practices. The old psychology was concerned with healing the suffering of real human beings. Pioneering thinkers like William James, Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung have become footnotes whose works are barely taught in many graduate programs. The intuitive brilliance and observational power of these great minds have been lost in obscurity by the field’s perennial focus on the new.

There are many pitfalls with our obsession with the new, but most importantly, we often disregard what’s working effectively and replace it with something that’s not.

If the old works well and it has integrity, be skeptical of the new. It’s one thing to improve on the old; it’s another to disregard the old because it’s fashionable to do so.