Key Podcast Highlights
How Do I Provide Excellent Customer Service?
1. Do What You Say You’re Going To Do: When the customer buys something, they have a certain expectation on what they’re going to buy. One of the best ways to deliver excellent customer service is to always follow through on the promises your business is making. If you’re promising to deliver your product within 30 days, you should do everything you can to make sure that happens.
2. Treat Your Customers With Respect: Follow the golden rule: Treat others the way you want to be treated. Good brands know that their customers want to feel acknowledged and appreciated.
3. Management Leads By Example: The standard of excellent customer service is passed down from the top level of management to employees of the business. If you’re a business owner, you have to depend on your employees to deliver quality customer service. Managers should show their employees the way they should communicate and behave towards customers.
Transcript
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Gene (00:03):
Hey everybody, it’s Gene Marks, and welcome to another episode of the Hartford Small Biz Ahead Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me this week. I want to talk about customer satisfaction and obviously there have been so much written about customer satisfaction over the years. A lot of people have heard the same thing over and over again. You would think by now that like, you know, with businesses being around as long as they’ve been around with, you know, industries, corporations, the economies, I mean, we’re talking thousands of years now, you would think that we would still get customer satisfaction right? We would’ve figured it out, but apparently not.
Gene (00:50):
Last week there was a new survey that came out, and it was done by CCW Digital, which is a division of customer management practice. It was done for an annual show called The Customer Contact Week in Vegas, where they polled, you know, the consumers 530 adult American consumers about their sentiments and preferences and purchasing habits. And there were some interesting things that came out from this survey about customer satisfaction. For example, only 7% of consumers feel experiences have improved over the past year, and a troubling 55% feel they have worsened. Nearly 60% of consumers say they share details of bad experience with personal contacts, while 29% actively rant about poor performance on social media. Other customer reactions including attempting to switch providers 48% and writing negative views, 39%. It seems like customer experience is getting worse and worse. And maybe that has to do with us as a society, our pre-election for immediate satisfactory response. You know, all that kind of stuff.
Gene (01:48):
But, you know, whether you are selling to consumers or you’re selling to other businesses, there’s really three things that you need to be doing to make sure that your customers are happy. And let me tell you what those three things are. And by the way, this is just what I’ve learned and over 20 years of running my business. And also, let me also caveat by saying, like, even in my company, we don’t do all these things well all the time. I mean, so I’m not saying that like this is, this will automatically improve your customer satisfaction. You gotta work at it. But I really kind of follow these three principles when it comes to customer satisfaction. Number one, we do what we say we’re going to do when a customer buys something, they have an expectation of what they’re gonna buy when they hire my firm to implement a software system. We lay out in our quote and contract what we’re gonna do. We talk it over with the customer and the client before we get started. And then what we, we do what we say we’re gonna do. If we say we’re gonna finish something in 60 days, we finish something in 60 days.
Gene (02:58):
If we say we’re gonna implement something or sell something that of these features or these benefits, we make sure that the customer’s getting those features and those benefits, we don’t make excuses. Nobody really wants to hear about that. We don’t promise stuff that we can’t deliver. We step up and we do what we’re, what we were hired to do. And listen, sometimes we screw up and we’ll make an estimate. And for a project and the project itself, we didn’t take into consideration the time that certain things took, or what was something that could be detrimental to the project. But if we made a commitment and we made a promise, our customers don’t wanna hear that. They just want us to do what they paid us to do, which is to implement the software, or retrofit their kitchen or mow their lawn or sell them ice cream.
Gene (03:47):
I mean, you do what you say you’re gonna do. Okay? That’s that. It sounds simple, but so many people don’t follow along those principles of just, just delivering on what you’re promising to do. So that’s number one. Okay? Number two is you show respect for your customers and your clients. And how you show your respect the most is you communicate with transparency. I mean, not all of us have stories to tell about airlines. I mean, there is nothing more annoying when you’re waiting to board a flight, for example, and the boarding time comes and goes, and there’s 200 people waiting to board and it’s 15 minutes after the boarding time, and the people at the gate are just staring at you and nobody’s giving you information, and we don’t know what’s going on. It’s just, it’s just disrespectful, isn’t it?
Gene (04:29):
Would you treat your customers this way? Hopefully not. People wanna have information, they want to be communicated if they have a question or if they have a request, or if they have a need, they expect to hear back from you at a timely basis. I mean, timely, like within like an hour or two. Even if you don’t have the answer for them right away, you at least show them the respect to acknowledge their request and, and respond back to them so that they know that you’re on it. I mean, there is just a lack of respect that customers today get from the people and the stores and the companies that they buy from. We all just wanna be treated well. This is why people we gravitate towards, you know, luxury brands and expensive restaurants, and high price hotels.
Gene (05:12):
We wanna be special, we wanna be kings and queens. That’s how people want to be treated. That’s the fantasy that we have about ourselves. And listen, you know, as a business, okay, whatever you’re selling, it’s not like you’re gonna make somebody a king or a queen, but you treat ’em with respect. You respond to them, you answer their questions, you’re transparent, you don’t mess around, you don’t lie to them. You make sure they have whatever information that they need to know what’s going on with their product or their service or whatever. And if they have a problem, you respond back to them. And if they’re not happy with the product, I mean, respectfully, you should be returning the product. Good brands understand this. So to really have good customer satisfaction, treat your customers with respect, and by doing that, communicate with them often and transparently.
Gene Marks (05:55):
Finally, there is a, I love to tell the story of, there’s an Italian restaurant. It’s a chain restaurant that’s near where I live. And every time I go into this restaurant, the people there, the, the people greeting you as you walk in the door and the people taking you to your table and then the servers themselves, everybody’s like, awesome. These are young people. They have a great attitude. They’re cheery. They’re into it. They’re very nice, they’re respectful. I mean, I’m telling you this, like a chain restaurant. I mean, that’s not an easy thing to do. You’re running a chain restaurant, you’re paying whatever you’re paying over minimum wage, and you’re trying to, you would think employees, they would be kind of miserable at a hardworking hourly kind of job.
Gene (06:38):
But at this restaurant the people there are, they’re not miserable. And I’ll tell you the reason why. It’s ’cause of their managers. I mean, they have, they have a couple of managers that work at this restaurant. Because I’ve seen them in action. They’re awesome, man. I mean, they’re positive, they’re happy. They, they, you know, they clearly enjoy their job. They enjoy the people that work for them. They, they show them respect and kindness. They lobby hard for them. They pay them as much as they can possibly pay them. They provide them a good area to work. And all of that oftentimes just then just trickles down to the customer itself. We can see it, we can feel it, we can embrace that, that these employees are, are into it, and they treat us really well. So listen, if you’re the owner of a business, it’s not like you’re having a face-to-face liaison with all of your customers all the time.
Gene (07:25):
You have to depend on your employees. And if you’re employees are happy, if they’re well compensated, if they enjoy where they’re working, if they respect you, if they’re into what you’re doing and they respect the product and the mission that you have, that will show itself to customers. And when it shows itself to a customer, they’re gonna be happy with the experience and be satisfied with the experience. So, lead by example, do your thing. Put the smile on. Show how dedicated and passionate, excited you are by what you’re doing, because your employees will pick up on that and they will ultimately communicate that down to your customers. So those are the three things that I’ve learned over the past 20 years about good companies that really provide great customer service. They do what they say they’re gonna do, they have respect for their customers with transparency and good communications.
Gene (08:14):
And number three is their management leads by example, because they know that what they show and how they behave and how they act to their customers, that itself will reflect on the employees who will then be doing the same thing with the customers as well. And that those three things I have found to be super powerful, to provide good customer service for any business regardless of size. Hey, my name is Gene Marks, and you have been listening to this week’s episode of The Hartford Small Biz Ahead Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. If you need any advice or tips or help in running your business, please join us at smallbizahead.com. Thanks again for your time. We will see you again next week. Take care.
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