If you want good service, be a good customer!
Dino Delic
Helping Comms Teams Become Trusted Advisors | Strategic Customer Advisor at Meltwater | Believer in Data-Driven Communications
It's February 2005.
I was a Marketing major, sitting in a lecture about Kotler's 7 Ps.
The year before, we learned about the 4 Ps of Marketing, which apply to products. But the 7 Ps apply to services.
Before teaching us anything about the 7 Ps, our professor stood up and said:
"If you want good service, be a good customer!"
Those words have stuck with me ever since, for two main reasons.
1?? Kindness Begets Good Service
You will never get good service if you act like an a**hole.
The rules might be on your side, and the policy on the wall might say you're entitled to something. But if you act entitled or rude, nobody wants to help you.
Not even the friendliest, best paid, most engaged, kindest customer service rep in the world wants to help the a**hole with their full effort.
Kindness is important.
I've been mad before when I get crappy service that is totally the other person's fault.
But if I happen to remember these words, I always find a better way out of the situation.
2?? To Nail Customer Experience, Experience Being the Customer
Marketers, communicators, business owners, entrepreneurs, and product designers—we all pour our energy into making things work.
And when they fail, it's often because we didn't think about the customer's perspective.
But, do you ever stop to think about your failure?
Do you try to get curious about your understanding of the customer, or do you blame the technology, the CRM, the data, the tool, the supplier, the dashboard, the colleague, the vendor, the machine?
Customer obsession.
Customer journey.
Empathic marketing.
Consumer intelligence.
Customer centricity.
These concepts have been around for a while. Now there’s a proliferation of customer journey mapping tools, experts, thought leaders, influencers, concepts, techniques, vendors, etc.
We know brands that understand their customers do well. But what's amazing to me is that marketers quickly forget they are customers themselves.
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When I coach our members of Meltwater's sales team, I always talk about times when they were the customer.
Buying
Shopping for
These are things we all do every day.And we have so many opportunities to learn from this.
Sometimes we learn, sometimes we shop.
When it comes time to sell, pitch, market, or persuade, what do we do? We go back to being a marketer or seller.
All the skills above are indeed VERY valuable skills, but they are NOT the most valuable skills, and they are not foundational skills.
So, the question is:
I asked this exact question to Emily Soccorsy .
Her job as a brand strategist is to help clients develop and sell their brands and grow their sales.
But what makes Emily an expert in this field is not just her ability to market or sell. It’s her human qualities.
Her empathy, her curiosity, her ability to listen and understand, her love of language, symbols, and culture.
It might seem demeaning to marketers to say that anybody can be a marketer. But it's true. Everyone can be. All you have to do is be a human. Which most of us are, right?
This conversation with Emily reminds us that you can read all the books and consume all the content on the internet about marketing and customer journey mapping, but you just need to start by being a good customer yourself.
Two things will happen:
Check out the full episode of my Expert Exchange with Emily:
Endlessly curious about how humans make meaning ?? Obsessed with tea, journals, and reading voraciously ?? Committed word nerd turned soulful brand strategist
8 个月Such a pleasure to chat with you Dino Delic ! Thanks for the chat on Expert Exchange.