Great Customer Service is No longer an Option

Today when there are tons of players in the market offering similar products/services, there’s no dearth of options for a buyer to choose from. Reducing cost has traditionally seemed to be the best way to overtake competition, combined with innovation. The landscape however is shifting to who offers the best Customer Service Experience. A good customer service experience has now become one of the key differentiators for a buyer to select or reject a partner.

One of the biggest reasons for a customer to not renew has frequently appeared to be the inefficiency of the product in delivering what the customer thought it would. Half the times, the customers are not able to optimally utilize the services/products, and end up thinking it can’t do it at all. A couple of days back I was on the phone with a customer who was quite unhappy about our data coverage. Although I couldn’t change his opinion about the data coverage immediately, I did show him how to use our Company Addition on Demand and Executive Addition on Demand feature to add data from our partners in real time. These are features that he wasn’t already aware of, and immediately got hooked on to. Without meaning to sound pompous, I had just saved us a customer. The moral is, it’s the responsibility of a company focused on delivering exceptional customer service to ensure that its agents are helping customers adopt better.

Customers hate to be surprised. It’s difficult pacifying an irate customer about a change you made, which significantly impacts the way a customer uses your product, without notifying him about it in advance. The rule of thumb is to communicate early and often. Quoting from a white paper I recently read (published by Parature) “A large transportation client says, “Our customers can handle the trains running late, what they can’t handle is when we don’t call them to tell them we are running late!” You may not have a solution or an answer - just keep them updated. Silence is not golden. How long does it
take you to respond to your best customers’ email or voicemail?” We recently made a significant change to the way our application looks and works. We made sure we adopted every possible method viz. newsletter, blog, emails, etc. to ensure our customers knew about the upcoming change. The result was an overwhelming welcome of the new look. It would have been extremely difficult to answer the questions if we had not worked on prior communication.

Another factor that I see making customers coming back to you is when you spoil them. Pamper them with exceptional customer service so that any other player appears to be slow and unresponsive. Despite having millions of customers worldwide, Salesforce.com manages to respond to phone calls in less than a minute. Their customer service reps continue to follow up with their customers until the customer confirms that the problem is resolved. We at InsideView strive to do the same. We approach all our support requests, from a Free or a Paid user, with equal weightage. We aim to respond as quickly as possible, trying to ensure first contact resolution.

Paul Greenberg (aka the Mr. Miyagi of CRM - the Pat Morita Mr. Miyagi) said something February at the BPT Partners training event (aka Social CRM Summit). He cited a survey that found 40% of people calling customer service for assistance, called with no expectation of having their problem resolved. (Source: Why Do 40% of People Call Customer Service Without Any Hope of Getting Helped? Mr Miyagi Knows...)

Four out of ten people calling customer service without hoping to be helped. Brent Leary goes to say that most of these four customers are simply looking for a listening ear, a person on whom to vent frustration about the service/product. Imagine the massive positive impact that the rep can make if he/she is actually able to resolve the issue, and send back the customer with a smile on his/her face. That’s what I call fabulous customer service.

It’s the need of the hour for every organization to focus their energies on setting up a robust customer service vertical. We at InsideView believe in under committing and over delivering. We believe in getting the wow from the customer every time they interact with either a customer service rep or their Customer Success Manager. Customer Service in Action (as one of our customers recently commented about us) is what we strive to achieve, and something that every company worth its dime should be practicing for every single customer interaction.

You can reach us at support@insideview.com for any feedback or questions.