Commentary

Customer Service Means Remarkable Service

by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer, August 29, 2017

According to author, Jeff Mowatt, reported in Sales and Marketing Management magazine, there are four customer service trends that are impacting customer relationships, and tips for capitalizing on them to boost your business.tr

Today's customers are so busy with their multiple demands at home and work, and are so distracted by their mobile devices that they no longer even notice "good" service. That means your team may work all day long delivering consistent service and the reward will be zero. Today's customer only notices two types of service: poor service and remarkable service, says the report. They need to be so impressed they are motivated to remark or talk about your service.
When your company faces tough competition, being better gets lost in the clutter. Lots of organizations claim to have better service. What customers really want to know is what makes you unique. That requires you and your team members to explore options to do things differently. Disrupt your market. Give customers something different to talk about. Or one of your competitors will.
Offering a vast array of products and services is no longer considered by customers to be helpful, they lead to decision fatigue. Your team members can really stand out by analyzing customer needs, explore which options are best suited to satisfy those needs, and present two or three final candidates in the simplest fashion to make your customer's decision easier.
in today's increasingly litigious society it's more important than ever that organizations admit fault and make amends the moment they have a service slipup. Smart service providers know that's it's much less costly to do the right thing for customers than to have disgruntled customers trashing your brand. Good news is that customers are wonderfully forgiving towards companies who quickly own their mistakes, and who do something to address the customer's hassle.

Bottom line - you and your team members need to be easy to do business with. That means coming up with unique business processes that make buying easier, narrowing the choices so that buying decisions are easier, training your team members so that even when things go wrong they recover your customers' trust.

This article is based on the book “Becoming a Service Icon in 90 Minutes a Month,” by customer service strategist and motivational speaker, Jeff Mowatt. To obtain your own copy of his book, please visit here. www.jeffmowatt.com

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2 comments about "Customer Service Means Remarkable Service".

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Chuck Lantz from 2007ac.com, 2017ac.com network, August 29, 2017 at 8:39 a.m.
Such a simple idea, which obviously works, but is ignored by far too many businesses. We drive thousands of miles a year, but that one fender-bender is foremost in our minds. We use the internet every day, but what we recall most clearly is when we lost service for an hour. And on and on.

How many companies have lost customers due to a single bad experience with a single customer service employee, who way too often was simply following "company policy", even when that policy defies common sense and common courtesy?
Reply

James Smith from J. R. Smith Group, August 29, 2017 at 10:25 a.m.

Chuck, right you are! Customer service, to be remarkable, starts with shifting the company from product-centric to customer centric and doing it with true commitment, planning and execution. I've dealt with numerous firms claiming to be customer centric...but that was just the right thing for the C-suite folks to say...at their heart, they were internally focused.
Voices of marketing wisdom are plentiful and they point to customer/consumer centrism. Failure to change, with negative word of mouth traveling at keystroke speed, is tossing the welcome matt out to laggard status. At a certain point, playing catch-up is simply not going to work as you watch leading firms leave you in their contrails.