The best way to save a disgruntled customer is to provide a great customer experience when things go wrong.
Joshua Porter (@bokardo), my co-founder at Performable, wrote a great summary of a recent post by Zendesk’s Justin Flitter on the steps to fix a negative customer experience.
Some of the steps they suggest include:
- Make contact and call/talk to the person, asking questions that dig deeper into what happened
- Print out the blog post and read it during a staff meeting, even a board or management meeting
- Reply with a personal comment on the blog post from a senior person and the store manager to demonstrate awareness and appreciation
At Performable we’re obsessed with providing the best customer experience humanly possible. Sometimes we nail it and sometimes we suck. The important thing is that we continue to focus on improving it every single day and consistently WOW-ing our customers.
Why the obsession? We believe that marketing is broken and sucks today. Outbound, inbound, whatever.. At the end of the day people hate marketing and marketers. They hate marketing because it is still interrupt driven, it is still about distracting me and not about delivering value.
Our goal at Performable is to revolutionize marketing, to kill the spam, and to teach marketers that the point is delivering value to their customers, not once but over the entire lifetime of the relationship, or as Seth Godin would say “embracing lifetime value“.
Once you change your mindset to embrace the lifetime value of a customer, to focus on building relationships and not just interrupting people the more important it becomes to invest in providing amazing customer experiences.
How do you measure your customer experience?
Related posts:
- Customer Development Lunch with Jonathan Mendez
- Customer Development Lunch with Dan Martell
- The biggest problem with A/B Testing
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Really nice post, David. It’s especially nice to hear this kind of thinking coming from someone behind a company such as yours. I’ve been enjoying the posts you guys at Performable have been writing & sharing lately. So, thanks.
- Dave
Dave,
Thanks for the note. Great to meet you!
I’d love to send you a Performable t-shirt so you can wear it around the office with pride.
Let me know your size and where to send it: dcancel –at– dcancel dots com.
Cheers,
David
Hi David,
Awesome posts ,in fact i check every day on your site to see if there is any update.
Request you to share your learning and do more posts.
Keep up the good work and thanks for inspiring us!!
Thanks,
Vikram
The sheer act of acknowledging they read the complaint and discussed it seems like common sense, but way too rare. All too often I’ve received canned responses which totally overlook the specific source of my problem.
Nice to see you take customer service and satisfaction so seriously in a world where it’s so easy to ignore and carry on. A reply from a senior person / manager is a nice touch to make any experience that little more personal and ‘real’. I’ll be sure to follow your work with Performable in the future!
Thanks for the comment Phil!
Great to meet you, thanks for stopping by.
;dc
Your post made me realize that I haven’t told my costumers how I feel about them. I will remedy that tonight. I’m very social face to face and have to learn to be personable without being in person. Not an easy task. Thanks for the glimpses into accomplishing just that.
Many, many years ago I produced a satellite teleconference for HBS called “Achieving Breakthrough Service.” I really learned the key lessons about service through the contents of that event. (And we are practicing them at SwiftMobile.) A couple of notes: Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, believed that the company was about service rather than software and made large investments in the service side of his business. He believed that service made customers into evangelists and this was the basis for the incredible early growth of Intuit. The HBS professors stressed that the “lifetime value of the customers” is the key metric for any business and that profitability is directly correlated with customer retention rates. This has to do with the cost to acquire a customer vs. the cost to retain one and the referrals you get from your existing customer base. If you really want to understand this business concept in depth, I recommend reading The Service Profit Chain by Len Schlesinger, Earl Sasser, and Jim Heskett:
http://www.amazon.com/Service-Profit-Chain-ebook/dp/B0031OQ0QU/ref=kinw_dp_ke?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2
They were the faculty I worked with in 1992 and their ideas are still as important as ever.
Kathleen,
You rock. Thanks for schooling me, I need it. Think for the tip on the book, I’ll be picking up a copy.
Cheers,
;dc