Last fall we had a wall built. I was amazed at how well the company did their job. They had the right tools, everyone knew what to do and they were done in the three days and left no mess. I asked the owner if he ever did any advertising. He told me that he has never advertised. All his business comes from customers telling others about his great work. Who do you think will get my recommendation, the company that built the wall or the pressure washing company that never came back to finish the job?
Everyone one wants customers that are excited about their products and services. Executives want customers to be delighted but we also want them to tell others about how good our company is at delivering what we promise.
Few people write something like this.
From the day we arrived in Mocksville on Feb.1, 2021, every interaction that I have had with your employees has consistently exceeded my expectations.
David Sobotta
Certainly even fewer people write that about their Internet Service Provider like I did. When I see employees that have customer satisfaction in their DNA, it is well worth the effort to encourage companies to treasure those employees.
In our very wired world where customer interactions take place in a mix of places from online to telephone calls and in person, you have to build a culture that values customers as something more than revenue. That is a challenge when many of the people coming into the work force are not enamored with making a phone call or even talking to someone that they do not know. The challenge is to get new workers to see the big picture of how all their actions reflect on the company. Treating customers well can improve customer satisfaction but also the bottom line.
Back in the day of rotary and pay phones, it was not unusual to make a phone call and not be sure who was going to answer the call. You needed enough conversational skills to get through the person who answered the phone to the one who you really wanted to get on the phone. It is a skill that many are missing today.
I have trained fresh out of college interns to make effective calls. By coaching them and using a script the first few times, they can learn to do a great job. It is far better to jump with them into the fire as opposed to throwing them in the fire and assuming they will figure it out. I had friends in the technology world who were willing to be pretend customers. Do practice sales calls with someone you do not know is a great way to get on the right track. Some of my pretend customers were people who I had also trained years earlier.
Talking to customers is a learned behavior and when you get good at it, you want to continue doing it. It also helps to new employees who might be technology savvy get some perspective on how their customers view technology. After the Macintosh was introduced by Apple, I was fond of making sales trainees learn how to use and sale the Apple IIe. I often introduced the training by saying you cannot appreciate how easy it is to draw a circle on the Macintosh without figuring out how to do it on an Apple IIe. Today I would probably make sure sales people could get a picture from a real camera to a smartphone and explain what they have done.
With automated online signups, the opportunities for good phone calls are diminishing but they are still there and should not be ignored. Writing a good customer response email is also something that seems to falling out of favor to automated responses. I am not a fan of automated responses or customers never being able to reach a real person. The easiest way to lose a customer is a phone tree with no real people.
An enthusiastic customer is worth their weight in gold but how do you measure that and take into account the not so enthusiastic customers?
In 2003, Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company, created a new way of measuring how well an organization treats the people whose lives it affects—how well it generates relationships worthy of loyalty. He called that metric the Net Promoter ScoreSM, or NPS®
https://www.netpromotersystem.com/about/
You may have never heard of NPS but it is likely that you have answered, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?” That is the classic NPS survey question and it is used to create a metric that shows what customers think about your company, its products and services. It allows companies to find under performing areas and fix them.
When it comes to customers that love companies, I feel fortunate to have spent a couple of decades at Apple. Apple would not be here today if its customers had not become extensions of its sales force. Customers loved the products so much, many were on a mission to convert friends and colleagues using MS/DOS and later Windows. However, one of the maxims about Apple for the balance of its early years was “love the products but hate doing business with the company.”
For many years at least in Higher Education, Apple’s revenue was sustained by a tiny higher education sales force that rarely numbered more than 125. They were responsible for institutional and individual sales all across the United States. The higher ed sales reps were so enthusiastic about their products and their customers that they held the whole thing together even when Apple ran through a set of horrible products or pulled stupid contractual stunts.
The Apple case makes it clear that in order to have delighted customers over the long run you need both enthusiastic customers and dedicated employees committed to their customers.
I worked at Webmail.us before it was purchased by Rackspace. Rackspace is mentioned as an example of the success of NPS in some publicity that I seen. Our goal at Webmail was to deliver fanatical customer support. I am pleased to see Rackspace still using the term and by the way, I love my Rackspace mail. Give me a few minutes and I will outline why.
We achieved fanatical customer support by aggressive training of sales and support people. We also gave them the resources and support to excel at their jobs. If you have ever had to change your MX records at your hosting provider or transfer your domain, you realize how complex a task that can be. We solved the problem by creating detailed step by step guides on the web that a new employee could click on and read to a customer when the need arose. We did the same thing for customers, we had guides for Rackspace email to work with every conceivable client. We were aggressive about testing on every platform.
Today I was researching some Internet Service Provider pricing. As is often the case I ran into some web pages that did not work properly. I had one that I tried on two browsers on a Mac and two on Windows before getting it to work on Chrome on my Pixel 6 Pro. Can you imagine how dissatisfied a customer experiencing that would be?
I did a stint working the retail floor in the early days of the computer revolution. I learned early that it wasn’t really the product features that would complete the sale, it was what the product would do for the customer that would get them to buy it.
Our challenge with many of the new sales and support people is to get them to understand they need to convey an understanding of what the product can do and how buying it from their company will make the product even more valuable.
I go back to my post on QR codes being required to register at North Carolina DMV offices. We need to explain key technologies like QR codes to people walking out the door with new smartphones or they won’t be very happy with their expensive smartphones or with the company that sold them when they try to get their licenses renewed. It only takes a couple minutes to make sure someone knows how to use a QR code. It might well be the gem of knowledge that keeps the customer excited about the experience with your company.
Apple’s Genius Bar was a brilliant idea. More companies need to embrace it. I can almost guarantee it will improve your NPS. Imagine a genius bar for smartphones. It would be swamped with customers eager to be convinced your company really understands their products.
Our technological infirmity 