Customer Service - Loyalty

Exceptional Customer Service Training

Here’s another cliché, with a new twist: “The customer is always right, even when he is wrong.” In essence, this attitude provides one important key to powerful, effective customer service. When your customers contact you with inquiries or complaints, are they treated with courtesy, compassion and understanding? In other words, are they treated the way you would like to be treated if you called a vendor with a complaint? In our Exceptional Customer Service Training Workshop, we work with you to develop the kind of listening skills and communication skills it takes to help every customer feel like he is valued, understood and taken seriously. It is this touch of kindness and genuine caring that will keep them coming back, even if you can’t always solve their problem.

Customer Loyalty: Keeping Your Customers Happy

An article by Simon Daisley, Managing Director of Profusion International in response to Bill Brendler’s article for CRM2day “Is customer loyalty dead”

I love Bill Brendler’s article “Is customer loyalty dead?” The answer is quite possibly, at the moment, “if not it pretty soon will be”. And the reason? “What is there for customers to be loyal to?”

Frederick Reichheld, one of the world’s leading experts on customer loyalty, speaking at the Wholehearted Customer Management summit in Dublin recently, commented: “Loyalty is matter of self-sacrifice. If you are loyal to something then you are prepared to invest in it.”

The trouble is that in today’s commercial environment, loyalty, per se, is alive and well. Sadly it is also very misdirected. People are loyal to the wrong things.

Tom Peter’s said back in the 70’s that the ‘customer is king’. In most service centres I have worked in you will find those words as a poster, a cartoon or a mousemat somewhere in the building. No one argues with that. The problem is that organisational behaviour suggests it is the shareholder who is king, not the customer.

Saying one thing and doing another confuses, frustrates and erodes credibility and trust.

Self-sacrifice for many managers involves firing the staff in their team to reduce the cost base and increase shareholder dividends. It rarely involves making a sacrifice to satisfy customers. People at the front line instinctively want to do a good job; they want to be able to make sacrifices for customers. Sadly systems and processes prevent them from doing so.

Some enlightened companies have spent the obligatory millions on CRM systems, but in almost 90% of cases this well-intentioned attempt at generating profitable growth has been half-hearted. How can a company spend €18 million on software, systems and consultancy as I heard recently and only spend €16,000 on training the 1200 staff in the organisation. No-one has actually joined the dots and invested in helping the people who want to deliver good service to use the tools that will actually help them to do so.

In this situation, typically, one of two things will happen:

Either people will lose the energy and personal desire to give good service and will just allow themselves to become a cog in a dysfunctional machine. Responses like “I’m not allowed to do that” speak volumes about the culture of the organisation you are talking to.

Alternatively, staff ‘cross the line’ and take the side of the customer against their own employer.

Crossing the line manifests itself in two ways: either the employee will break the company’s rules and procedures in order to deliver a good service experience or even worse, they will pour scorn on their own organisation. A great example of this happened to me just the other day when I phoned my high street bank to renew my mortgage. I was balking at the imposition of a £200 surcharge just to continue as a customer. The bank needed to do nothing except keep taking the same amount of money from me every month. Yet I was expected to pay for the privilege. The response I got from the call handler should be the epitaph for customer loyalty:

“Yes, I know it’s crap isn’t it. Management introduced this surcharge last year to keep aligned with the competition. At least that was the excuse they used. Don’t worry, if you recommit now we can ignore that charge.”

The call handler has my total trust and respect as an individual – he was prepared to sacrifice all sense of professional integrity and personal loyalty in order to accede to my wishes. Good on him.

And what of my loyalty to the bank…

“Dust to dust and ashes to ashes”.

I am investing an enormous of my own time and energy trying to find an alternative mortgage supplier. This is all because someone sat at a desk in senior management thought they could squeeze an extra £200 out of me, to drive profitability up and consequently increase the share price. Even the staff saw through the motives.

As for the excuse of ‘keeping aligned with competition’ this is even worse. I wonder if the CEO of this particular bank has the poster on his wall: “Our mission - We want to be as bad as everyone else.”

I somehow doubt it. If he did though it would be the one target he could honestly say he had hit all on his own.

By Simon Daisley

"A Successful Business Means Staying In Touch with Your Customers"

Customer Service Skills Quote
You have to learn to treat people as a resource......you have to ask not what do they cost, but what is the yield, what can they produce?
--Peter F. Drucker

Keeping Your Customers Happy - Suggested Reading

The Nordstrom Way : The Inside Story of America's #1 Customer Service Company
by Robert Spector, Patrick D. McCarthy

Becoming a Category of One: How Extraordinary Companies Transcend Commodity and Defy Comparison
by Joe Calloway

Angel Customers and Demon Customers: Discover Which is Which and Turbo-Charge Your Stock
by Larry Selden, Geoffrey Colvin

Managing Customer Relationships : A Strategic Framework
by Don Peppers, Martha Rogers

Customer Mania! : It's Never Too Late to Build a Customer-Focused Company
by Ken Blanchard

BE OUR GUEST : Perfecting the art of customer service
by Disney Institute

The Firm of the Future: A Guide for Accountants, Lawyers, and Other Professional Services
by Paul Dunn, Ronald J. Baker

CustomerCentric Selling
by Michael Bosworth

Moments of Truth
by Jan Carlzon

Clued In : How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again
by Lewis Carbone

What Clients Love: A Field Guide to Growing Your Business
by Harry Beckwith

The CRM Handbook: A Business Guide to Customer Relationship Management
by Jill Dyché

The SERVICE PROFIT CHAIN
by James L. Heskett

Think Like Your Customer : A Winning Strategy to Maximize Sales by Understanding and Influencing How and Why Your Customers Buy
by Bill Stinnett

ROI Selling : Increasing Revenue, Profit, and Customer Loyalty through the 360 Sales Cycle
by Michael Nick, Kurt Koenig