Customer Service - My 5 Week Wake Up Call

"You need to work on your customer service skills", my co-founder affectionately told me this week.

In a recent survey, 86% of shoppers said they are willing to pay more for better customer experiences and 79% of people will avoid a brand or company if they have received poor service in the past.

This means it's not always about price, it's about what the customer feels when they interact with you. But why do so many of us struggle to get it right?

1 Ego gets in the way

Reviews, customer feedback and surveys are becoming part and parcel of modern life. They are the tool that prospective customers use to check you out before choosing to spend time or money with you. How you take on board and respond to that feedback is critical.

Oprah Winfrey, speaking about how the Harpo team had worked together for decades producing her famously successful show, used the saying "feedback is your friend". This is a way to try to diffuse the sting that we sometimes feel when we hear what feels like criticism. We take it personal, even if it has nothing to do with us personally. Rather than hearing that the customer experience wasn't right on that occasion, we translate it into:

• you've done something wrong
• you've failed
• YOU are wrong
• YOU are a failure

That's when our ego (aka the chimp from the book The Chimp Paradox) steps angrily to our defence and starts typing the hasty email response: 'Dear Mr Customer, how dare you... you jus don't get why we do things the way we do...' or words to that affect, disguised through some corporate spiel and acronyms where we pretend to listen but we're actually telling them to go away, politely.

Lesson 1: Listen - really listen, and dissect the learning points from the feedback so that you can improve your business. See feedback as a gift.

2 Size doesn't matter

Popular opinion suggests that smaller companies do better at customer service than larger companies. But does the evidence support that? Certainly, a smaller business should theoretically have advantages over larger ones in dealing with customers, including more flexibility to respond to customers needs, and employees who have a better understanding of the company's goals and values. But does that mean they deliver better customer service?

Strip away the systems and processes and all you have is people interacting with people, particularly in service businesses. Whether or not they work for a large or small company is probably irrelevant. And we've all seen small business owners have a meltdown on social media when they get negative feedback from a customer.

Lesson 2: Just because we're a small business, doesn't mean we don't need a relentless focus on customer service.

3 Learn from others

Earlier in the year I attended a networking event which made a lasting impression. The Midlands Retail Forum session on Hospitality Mindset was full of words of wisdom from those that had gone before and are at the top of their game in terms of providing great customer service, including Tony Elvin, Award-Winning hotelier and retailer. When going into unchartered waters, we not only need to work out how to run the business (processes and systems) but we need to start with what is going to create a great customer experience, and what is the benchmark standard for the industry or sector.

Lesson 3: Find people that do it well and ask them for advice and guidance. They will only be too happy to help.

4 Poor Customer Service as an 'accidental' strategy

It's unclear whether companies like Ryanair and United Airlines have deliberately put customer service at the bottom of their strategic objectives, but what is clear is that it is not at the top.

For decades, the mantra of the customer always being right may have led some businesses down paths that did not make sense. Has the pendulum now swung so far the other way that businesses treat customers with disdain, where experience is an acceptable trade-off for price or product competitiveness?

Michael O'Leary might argue that he has to disregard customer's displeasure about the way the service is delivered, in order to deliver a low-cost service that customers keep going back to. And however crazy it may seem, people still fly Ryanair, in their droves.

Steve Jobs said, "the customer doesn't always know what they want until you show it to them", but he still started first and foremost by addressing and meeting the customer's needs.

Lesson 4: The customer MAY not always be right, but the customer experience needs to be right at the top of our organisation's goals.

5 It's not what you said, it's how you said it

"You need to work on your customer service skills" was said in response to the sometimes concise (aka blunt) way that I structure text messages and emails. Every interaction with the customer is an opportunity to either improve their experience with you, to worsen it, or leave it just the same - neutral impact, if you're lucky.

My immediate response to that criticism was that I was merely getting to the point - no fluff, just the facts. But what a missed opportunity! Think of what could have come from those brief interactions, and the customer loyalty that could have ensued. This is where companies like Virgin really excel. They have figured out how to say things perfectly, even boring but necessary in-flight instructions - check out their Twitter feed for some great examples of how to speak to customers.

Lesson 5: Take care over each customer interaction - see it for the opportunity it is - and always be sociable and personable. Try smiling whilst typing your messages to customers.

6 Play to your strengths

Let's face it, we can't all be good at everything. Reality is that my twenty plus years of working mainly with bean counters (of which I am one) in large corporations probably haven't set me up well in terms of being a natural when dealing with customers in a retail or hospitality environment. And being a fussy customer yourself, one who complains when you are on the receiving end of poor service, doesn't therefore equip you as well as you think it might, when you are the one delivering service to customers - trust me! #karma

This is why it's important to have balance within the team. Knowing who excels at customer service is crucial, and it might not be the most senior or the most experienced team member. That's not to say that everyone gets to forget about customers, just that you know the batting order and put your star player out for handling those really important customer touch-points.

Lesson 6: Know who is great at customer service and use them to spearhead how you deal with customers. Encourage other team members to learn from them.

#StillLearning