Shep Hyken's Blog, page 198

Amazing Business Radio: Donna Cutting

December 17: Donna Cutting Discusses Making Your Customers Feel Like a Celebrity

Shep Hyken interviews Donna Cutting; author, speaker, and customer service expert, about creating exceptional customer experiences; including some tips from her new book, “501 Ways to Roll Out the Red Carpet.” Donna shares insight on how you can give your customers the celebrity treatment.

 

Click here to listen.

“It’s the simple little things like just a handwritten thank you note.” – Dona Cutting

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Four Ways a Liberal Return Policy Creates Customer Confidence

Positive CX

Every business has returns. It doesn’t matter if you’re B2B or B2C. Returns are inevitable. The industry that probably has the most returns is retail. It’s just a fact. Beyond defective merchandise, which happens in any type of business, someone won’t like that sweater you picked out. Someone has no use for that gadget you thought he or she would love. You get the idea. So, just count on it. It’s going to happen. The question is, how well will you or your business handle it?

Regardless of the type of business you’re in, a good return program is important to your overall customer service and experience strategy. Stats and facts indicate that 85% of customers will not do repeat business with a company where returns are complicated or inconvenient. So, think about this:

How easy are you to do business with?

Ideally, you make it easy to buy from you. You create a positive customer service experience that would make someone want to come back and do business with you again. If for any understandable reason your customers want to return what they bought from you, it shouldn’t ruin their overall experience with you. If anything, that interaction can actually lead to a higher level in customer confidence.

With that in mind, here are four ways to handle the return that not only make it easy for the customer, but also boosts your customer’s confidence, making them want to come back and do business with you. Why? Because you are easy to do business with.

The return policy should be easy to find. Be it posted on a sign in a store or easily found on your website, make it obvious for everyone to see or find. A friendly, customer-focused return policy creates trust, which leads to confidence. Confidence turns into sales and even customer loyalty.


Just take it back. No questions asked. Are you confident enough in the merchandise you sell to stand behind it? If not, why are you selling it? I once interviewed a CEO of a business and he said he wanted the easiest and most liberal return policy in his industry. He said, “If you don’t like the color of the box, we’ll take it back.”


Have agreements with manufacturers and distributors that will take back return items – ideally for any reason. This will give you the flexibility and confidence you need with your merchandise. If you are the manufacturer, go back to number two: Just take it back.


Don’t create return policies to protect yourself from a tiny percentage who might try to take advantage of you. This is very important. Yes, there will always be those that try to return a used and abused item – and without a receipt. Don’t penalize your honest customers for the sins of a few.

So, think about your return policy – does it make you easy to do business with?

Shep Hyken is a customer service expert, keynote speaker and New York Times bestselling business author. For information contact or www.hyken.com. For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs go to www.thecustomerfocus.com. Follow on Twitter: @Hyken

(Copyright © MMXV, Shep Hyken)

 

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5 Top Customer Service Articles For the Week of December 14, 2015

Top Customer Service and Business Articles

Each week I read a number of customer service articles from various online resources. Here are my top five picks from last week. I have added my comment about each article and would like to hear what you think too.

Customer Experience Needs More Emotion (Infographic) by Bruce Temkin

(Customer Experience Matters) As the title of this post says, CX needs more emotion.

My Comment: This is actually an infographic, but has some fascinating information about the emotional side of the customer experience. If you want to create loyalty, there must be some type of emotional connection.

3 Reasons Why Apologies to Customers Will Fail by Elaine Fogel

(Elaine Vogel) We’ve heard it before and we’ll hear it again. I’m sorry, I apologize.  These empathetic statements are part of most customer service training programs.

My Comment: They say, “Love means never having to say your sorry!” Well, that may work in “love,” but it doesn’t work in business. Actually, while sorry is nice, as the author, Elaine Fogel, points out, it takes more than that to win back the customer’s confidence.  Great article on why in business, sometimes apologies are just not enough. By the way, the author has a new book out titled, “Beyond Your Logo.” If you like this article, you’ll love the book.

B2B Executives Expand Customer Experience Investments by Anna Papachristos

(1to1 Media) Like their B2C counterparts, B2B executives plan to invest in technology and talent that will elevate their customer experience initiatives.

My Comment: Here is an excellent article that incudes many customer service stats and facts for B2B companies. Too many times I have heard disagreements from executives that customer service is more for consumer focused companies (B2C) than B2B. Well, that is just not the case – and this article makes that exact point!

69 Experts Share 2016 Marketing Predictions by Bryan Kramer

(Bryan Kramer) Here are 69 predictions about content, social and digital media marketing in 2016 with just 2 questions.

My Comment: Bryan Kramer has created an amazing article by asking 69 of his closest friends to weigh in on their predictions for social media and content marketing. I found some of the predictions fascinating and exciting. Great times ahead. Thank you Bryan!

Epic Business Quotes from 1 Year of Podcasting by Jeannie Walters

(360 Connext) We’ve reached our 73rd+ episodes now, and the list of great guests is too long to provide here. If I consider all the things I wasn’t expecting to learn, the list would be even longer. Here is a small selection of some the business quotes and lessons that stuck with me!

My Comment: Here are a number of quotes that came from the podcasts that Jeannie Walters and Adam Toporek conducted with customer service and experience experts over the last year. The really cool thing is that they link to the actual podcast episode. This is a great read – and a great listen!

Shep Hyken is a customer serv ice expert, professional speaker and New York Times bestselling business author. For information contact or www.hyken.com . For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs go to www.thecustomerfocus.com . Follow on Twitter: @Hyken

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Guest Blog: Turning Customer and Business Wishes into Reality

This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post, my colleague Joseph Michelli writes about the importance of perfecting the customer experience and how it takes great leadership to achieve. I always like to say that it is the leadership that creates the culture and manages the vision of their organization. – Shep Hyken

Is delivering a great customer experience on your holiday shopping list?

According to Forrester Research, 92% of business leaders have “customer experience” improvement among their key strategic objectives.  Unfortunately, despite all that strategic prioritization, consumer satisfaction (according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index -ACSI) hovers at a 9 year low.

You, however, are a well-informed business person (heck, you read Shep’s blogs), so clearly you’re satisfying your customers! The real issue is whether you’re satisfied with your customers’ emotional engagement, loyalty, and frequency of referrals.

I recently asked Gareth Joyce, vice president of Customer Services at Mercedes-Benz USA, what he thought made the difference between businesses that consistently delight customers and those that merely satisfy them.  Gareth starkly said, “The difference is leadership.  It is all about inspiring people toward violent execution.”

While I was initially taken aback by linking the word “violent” to the work “execution,” the phrase has grown on me.  All too often, leaders accept “tolerable” execution and celebrate incremental improvements toward “good” outcomes.  Extraordinary customer experience brands are fueled by leaders who set audacious customer experience goals and enliven their people to pursue them.

Gareth’s “violent execution” is in keeping with a phrase I once heard while working with a Ritz-Carlton executive.  That leader told me he wanted to deliver “perfect customer experiences.”  When I sought to clarify by asking, “Did you mean exceptional?”  He firmly responded, “No, I meant perfect.  The pursuit of exceptional is not good enough. Perfection is about constantly striving to be better today than I was yesterday.”

Daniel Pink, in his book Drive, talks about 3 key motivators of human behavior – purpose, mastery, and autonomy.  By focusing on “why” consistently great customer experiences matter, great leaders help team members see the “purpose” and value that comes from forging personal emotional connections with customers.  That value is realized for those served, those serving, and for the long-term well-being of the business.

By setting lofty customer experience goals (e.g. violent execution or perfection), great leaders are essentially encouraging their people to stretch in pursuit of significance.  That striving engages the human need to master his/her environment.  Inspirational leaders understand that they nudge people toward mastery as agents of influence not as agents of command or control. They appreciate that people need a sufficient amount of autonomy to innovate solutions that meet the needs of those they serve.

I’ve recently witnessed the power of visionary leadership (focused on purpose, mastery and autonomy) in the transformation of the Mercedes-Benz USA (MBUSA) customer experience.  In fact, I’ve chronicled that journey in my recently released book titled Driven to Delight.

In 2012, I was contacted by MBUSA CEO Steve Cannon to assemble a panel of leaders from iconic customer experience brands such as Zappos, The Ritz-Carlton etc.  Steve Cannon had customer experience excellence on his priority list, but more boldly, he publically claimed his legacy would be the transformation of customer experiences at Mercedes-Benz.  Steve acknowledged that while Mercedes-Benz products and marketing lived up to the brand’s tag line “best or nothing,” the MBUSA customer experience being delivered across more than 370 dealerships was not on par.

Steve set an audacious goal to do more than emulate the customer experience of the best luxury car brands and instead challenged his people to consistently deliver experiences better than those being delivered by perennial customer experience champions like Nordstroms.  Steve and his leadership team’s goal was framed in the context of being “driven to delight” for every customer, every time, no excuses!

In partnership with dealership staff, customer journey maps were created, effective customer feedback tools were developed, cultural immersion programs were deployed, and people were held accountable to and rewarded for delighting customers.

So what about you? What is your transformational and inspiring customer experience vision?  How effectively are you challenging your team to stretch toward “perfection” and how accountable are your people when it comes to passionately executing in way that puts you in the ranks of the best-of-the best customer experience providers?

You may not be able to put “perfect customer experiences” under your tree or give it as a Hanukkah gift, but I’m certain you can champion the vision and drive outcomes. Those outcomes will assure your business will be serving customers for many, many holiday seasons to come.

Joseph Michelli, Ph.D., C.S.P., is a professional speaker, business consultant, and New York Times #1 Bestselling Author.  His latest book, Driven to Delight: Delivering World-Class Customer Experience the Mercedes-Benz Way was released earlier this week.  For more information on Joseph and his services, go to www.josephmichelli.com. 

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com . Read Shep’s latest Forbes Article:

Drucker Said ‘Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast’ And Enterprise Rent-A-Car Proves It

 

 

 

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Amazing Business Radio: Sarah Petty

December 10: Sarah Petty on Being Worth Every Penny.

Shep Hyken talks with Sarah Petty, owner of Sarah Petty Photography Studios, author of “Worth Every Penny: Build A Business That Thrills Your Customers And Still Charge What You’re Worth.” Sarah shares marketing techniques like the “dog whistle”, “slug bug”, and how building your business like a boutique can give you a competitive advantage. How to make your customers know you are worth every penny.

Click here to listen.

“Everyone can’t be my customer, and that has to be okay.” – Sarah Petty

 

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Guarantee Your Products and Service to Create Customer Confidence

Creating Trust

Customers want to feel confident with the companies they do business with.  It doesn’t matter what type of business you’re in or how you sell. It can be a manufacturer, a brick-and-mortar retailer, an online e-commerce company – basically any type of business must create confidence. 

I’ve been preaching for years that the way to create confidence is to deliver a consistent and predictable experience. And, that is still the most powerful way to get a customer to trust you. When your customers know you will always do what you say, you will always be on time, you will always do what you promise, you are always polite and appreciative … well you get the idea. That word always is a pretty powerful word. It’s about consistency and predictability.

There is one more piece I’d like to add to the concept of confidence, which is to guarantee whatever it is that you do or sell.

Why do people like to shop at Nordstrom? They know they are going to get great merchandise delivered with great service. In addition, they know that if for any reason they are unhappy with their purchase, or if there is a problem with whatever they bought, they know that Nordstrom has their back and will give them a refund or exchange the product.

I recently had the chance to talk to Aaron Leon of LD Products. His company sells remanufactured ink cartridges for copiers and printers. You might have a brand name printer like a Cannon or HP, but you don’t have to buy brand name ink cartridges from those same brands. LD Products prides itself on a very cost effective alternative, sometimes saving the customer as much as 70% off the brand names. And, while LD Products promises great customer service, they know that they have a battle with the perception of the quality of remanufactured ink cartridges. So, what did Aaron Leon do? He offered a guarantee that takes all of the risk out of the purchase.

Just how strong is the guarantee? Basically, if for any reason you have a problem – which you won’t – or you’re not happy, LD Products will take the product back and refund your money. That’s a nice guarantee, but the quintessential guarantee statement can be summed up with what Aaron Leon tells his customers:

“If you don’t like the color of the box, we’ll take it back!”

Now, that’s a guarantee!

So, are you so comfortable with your products and services that you’re willing to offer that kind of guarantee to your customers? Think about the trust and confidence that it would create. Think about the increase in sales. Think about the repeat and loyal customers. Creating customer confidence means delivering a consistent, predictable experience and standing behind your product or service – with a guarantee.

Shep Hyken is a customer service expert, keynote speaker and New York Times bestselling business author. For information contact or www.hyken.com. For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs go to www.thecustomerfocus.com. Follow on Twitter: @Hyken

(Copyright © MMXV, Shep Hyken)

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5 Top Customer Service Articles For the Week of December 7, 2015

TOP CUSTOMER SERVICE AND BUSINESS ARTICLES

Each week I read a number of customer service articles from various online resources. Here are my top five picks from last week. I have added my comment about each article and would like to hear what you think too.

5 Creative Ways to Get to Know Your Customers Better by Chad Hendren

(WinTheCustomer) Real insight into the psyche of customers is rarely achieved today. But with the right process and focus on key data points, information can be leveraged to improve customer experiences throughout the entire customer journey.

My Comment: Who doesn’t want to get to know their customers better?  And, once you do the benefits (to both the company and the customer) are obvious. Read more about this in this excellent article about getting to know your customer better.

5 Customer Appreciation Tweaks Customers Will Gobble Up! by Jeannie Walters

(360 Connext) Here are 5 easy ways to express customer appreciation.

My Comment: Customers always want to feel appreciated. It can be as simple as a verbal thank you as the customer is walking out of the store, a thank you note or something more, as this article shares with us.  Always show some form of appreciation to your customers!

Excellent Customer Experience lessons from Sam Walton to help you be LEGENDARY! by Sonal Jaiswal 

(Customer Guru) Here are some Customer Experience lessons that every business can learn and use in growing themselves.

New Comment: Love this article. Take some of Sam Walton’s great quotes and add a sentence or two of explanation and you have a great lesson (or two or three) that just about any company can take advantage of.

How to Become a Leader in Customer Experience | Driven to Delight by Joseph Michelli

(The Michelli Experience) There are leaders, followers, and…well people who just get in the way! Which are you?

My Comment: What I love about this article is that the author uses great companies (that we all know about) to showcase customer experience. It’s much easier to learn from companies we know about, can relate to and understand.

6 Things You Need to Know About Multi Channel Customer Service by Jacob Firuta

(LiveChat) Here’s what you need to know about multi channel customer service to make it work it for your company.

My Comment: Great concepts here for the company that offers customer support via multiple channels. Many

companies are still using traditional support methods, as in the phone and email, but today there are so many other ways customers want to contact a company. Some good tips here for the company that is thinking about jumping into multi-channel support as well as a few ideas to consider if you’re already doing it.

Shep Hyken is a customer serv ice expert, professional speaker and New York Times bestselling business author. For information contact or www.hyken.com . For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs go to www.thecustomerfocus.com . Follow on Twitter: @Hyken

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Guest Blog: Don’t Confuse Customer Services with Customer Service

This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post, my colleague Bill Quiseng writes about how technology has impacted customer service. Although technology can be amazing, Bill reminds us that we cannot lose personalization and human interaction with our customers. –  Shep Hyken

There are only two ways to make a profit in business. One way is to increase sales. The other is to reduce costs. Companies have relied on technology to reeduce one of the most expensive costs in any business – human labor. Banks have replaced tellers with ATM’s, direct deposit and internet banking. Gas stations and supermarkets have moved to credit card readers and scanners, reducing the number of cashiers and eliminating gas attendants and grocery store baggers. Even hotels are experimenting with robots to deliver room service.  But in this technological evolution, too many companies are confusing customer services with customer service. Customer services is all about how to speed up the transaction. Businesses have used technology to become more efficient at the process of serving customers.

But being good at customer services does not build customer loyalty. All a competitor has to do is ante up with the same technology. Now even non-related businesses are looking to take revenue from each other. Where banks might have been the first to offer self-service options and debit cards, stores now offer ATM’s and their own credit card services, stealing fees and interest revenue from banks. In fact, how loyal would you be to your bank if it started to raise fees for its services? When was the last time you actually walked into a bank and interacted with a teller? Businesses may have reduced labor costs by offering hi-tech customer services, but by reducing human interaction with their customers, they inadvertently have jeopardized customer loyalty. As a result, customer services may help to keep customers, but rarely does it increase sales.

Walt Disney had the best formula for boosting sales, “Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it they will want to come back and see you do it again and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.” Great companies will always remember that despite advances in technology, customer loyalty must be earned by nurturing a genuine emotional connection.

Focus on the interaction, not the transaction. Define ways to personalize the customer experience. Restaurants that take reservations usually ask the question, “Are you celebrating a special occasion this evening?” Many will offer a complimentary dessert for an anniversary celebration. But the best create a wow moment by personalizing the menu header with the couple’s names and delivering that dessert with Happy Anniversary and their names written in chocolate on the rim of the plate. Of all the pictures taken that evening of the food, which do you think is featured and forever immortalized on Facebook for their friends to see and like? And how many friends have gone to that restaurant hoping to have that same kind of experience?

Personalizing the customer experience can be as simple as using the customer’s name. Simple, but simply not done. Think back to the last several times when you were a customer. You hand a credit card with your name printed right on it to the cashier. Yet the last five times you used your credit card, how many times did the cashier use your name in giving it back to you? Rarely, if at all. An opportunity to embrace you, as a customer, is lost.

The sales adage that people buy from people they know, like, and trust should be your customer service mantra. If I were a retailer, I’d use the technology to make sure that the card swipe info would post the customer’s name on the mini screen in front of the cashier. I’d educate every cashier to look at the screen or the credit card and then look back to the customer to establish eye contact (trust), smile (likeability) and sincerely say, “Mr. Customer’s Name, thank you for shopping at Name of Company. We certainly appreciate it.” That small wow would make a big difference in having that customer return again and again.

So don’t confuse customer services with customer service. Real customer service is all about how to enhance the human interaction. As Shep Hyken has said, “The greatest technology in the world hasn’t replaced the ultimate relationship building tool between a customer and a business – the human touch.”

Bill Quiseng is a speaker, blogger and award-winning writer in the areas of customer service for front-line associates and customer service leadership for managers. He has over thirty years of luxury hotel/resort management experience. Bill’s personal achievements include receiving the Renaissance Hotels General Manager of the Year and Marriott Leadership Excellence Awards. He blogs about customer service at billquiseng.com and curates #custserv and #cx content on Twitter @billquiseng.

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to  customerserviceblog.com . Read Shep’s latest Forbes Article:

There’s Black Friday, There’s Cyber Monday, And Then There’s Amazon.com

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Amazing Business Radio: Deepak Advani

December 3: Deepak Advani Speaks on Deepening Your Connection to Your Customers.

Shep Hyken talks with Deepak Advani, General Manager of IBM Commerce, which focuses on leveraging data, analytics and cloud; to build deeper more valuable engagements with their customers, partners and suppliers. The discussion focuses on analytics and how to use them to market to your customers to keep them engaged and have an exceptional experience. This is powerful information for anyone involved in marketing, sales and customer retention.

Click here to listen.
“We’ve really moved into a world where experience trumps everything else” – Deepak Advani

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Never Compromise the Consistency of the Customer Experience

Inconsistent Experience

The other night my wife and I went out to dinner. The customer service was quite good and the food was excellent. However, we might hesitate before going back.

As we were seated, I noticed one of the other guests had a delicious looking entrée. I asked the server about it and he said it was jambalaya, which is a Cajun rice dish with sausage, shrimp, and several other savory ingredients. So, I ordered it. When it came out, it was less about rice and more about sauce. And, there was a large amount of seafood, chicken, and sausage. It looked different that the other guest’s entrée, but it was delicious.

The owner came over and I commented how delicious it was. I also mentioned that it had more sauce than expected. I wasn’t complaining. I was complementing the chef, so I thought.

Her response was appreciative. She then went on to tell me that the kitchen staff was a bit over-worked that day, as there was a special event that was causing them a little stress in the kitchen. The jambalaya I saw at the other table was more typical than what I was served – more rice and less seafood.

So, here is the point. There was great food and great service, but I got a peek behind the curtain when the owner revealed that she was willing to let a meal come out of the kitchen that was inconsistent from what was typically served. My food was good and had more seafood than usual because the kitchen staff was moving too fast and not paying attention to detail. What would have happened if the meal was prepared with less seafood than usual? Would the owner have turned her head to that as well?

More importantly, what will happen when I come back next time and order the same dish, and it comes out the way it is supposed to be prepared? I’ll probably notice the difference. I might wonder why there isn’t as much of that delicious seafood they gave me the last time I ordered this dish. I might say something to the server or owner. Or not. I might just wonder what I will get when I come back the next time – if I ever come back at all.

Essentially the restaurant, by accident, has created a false expectation. The sure way to confuse your customers and make them lose confidence in you and your business is to deliver an inconsistent experience. I can’t stress enough how important consistency is to any business. There must be consistency in your product, your customer service – the entire customer experience.

Shep Hyken is a customer service expert, keynote speaker and New York Times bestselling business author. For information contact or www.hyken.com. For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs go to www.thecustomerfocus.com. Follow on Twitter: @Hyken

(Copyright © MMXV, Shep Hyken)

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