I host some online projects with Liquid Web. I called them one evening this week to ask some questions and get some issues resolved.

When I got off the call, I told my wife, “That was the best tech support phone call I’ve ever made.”

She responded, rather shocked, “You were on the phone with tech support? I never would have known.

“What do you mean?”

She explained: “Well, with tech support calls, you usually get an aggressive tone and gradually get louder and more frustrated as the call progresses.”

She’s right. Most tech support calls I make end in frustration. Where others have failed, Liquid Web succeeded. How?

The support person made the entire call a very comfortable experience. Liquid Web and my support representative excelled in several key elements:

Availability and Accessibility

I made my call after regular business hours. Often times you’ll have to wait for the next business day to get a hold of companies. In time-critical businesses, web hosting in this case, you need to be there for your customers.

After a few automated phone tree questions, I was routed directly to a support person. No wait. No endless hold music.

Communications

The girl I spoke with could have been the girl who lives down the street. There was no thick accent or language barriers. Imagine how comfortable customers will be when they can feel like they are talking to a neighbor. Localize your support.

No Rush

I was able to make it through my call with Liquid Web without being rushed off the line. Because I wasn’t feeling pressure to finish, I was able to better collect my thoughts and get all my issues resolved.

If your customer is in a hurry, feel the urgency and make things happen. However, you should never rush the customer just to get through the transaction. Customer throughput will affect your margins but you need to carefully balance customer care with operational efficiency.

Customized Support

At one point my support representative asked if I was comfortable doing something myself. I said “not really” and so she walked me through one task and completed another for me.

Your customers will have varying skills and abilities. Find out what they know or can do and tailor your response accordingly. If you know the customer doesn’t know, you can make things as easy as possible. Experienced customers getting simple instructions will take less offense than novice customers getting complicated mumbo-jumbo.

Read the previous issues of Call Center Chronicles:

• Episode 1: Nabisco
• Episode 2: Current

Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, the authors behind Call to Action, deliver another insightful read with their latest book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing.

Their previous work, Call to Action, talked mostly about online conversions and optimizations. The Eisenberg brothers’ latest book, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, takes a broader look at marketing in general and how you can specifically increase your conversion rates across media channels.

The Eisenbergs start by describing the current marketing environment through several examples that did or didn’t turn out like the vendor wanted. These stories are told from the customer perspective, which you should always be seeking.

Where Call to Action mentions a few persuasion techniques, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark outlines the full “Persuasion Architecture system. Their system is composed of six phases:

1. Uncovery – “The goals of uncovery are to identify the value of the business and articulate it in a way that matters to the customer.
2. Wireframing – “Defines the “what of the creative process, providing the structure that will deliver the persuasive experience.
3. Storyboarding – “iteratively creates the mock-ups in which you flesh out the structure of the wireframe
4. Prototyping – “… the prototype is virtually indistinguishable from the final product.
5. Development – “produce everything that was specified in the prototype
6. Optimization – “Testing and measuring in order to optimize is … the only way you can determine how closely you are meeting your objectives and how you can improve results.

Cross Channel Unity

Your customers view your company as a single entity. They don’t know or care that you have five divisions and that your website department doesn’t talk to your retail locations. Customers need a unified experience from beginning to end. As you define your “persuasion architecture, you’ll need to follow the customer from first contact through the buying process all the way to post-sales support. If the customer gets lost as they move from one media channel to another, even within your same company, they may be lost forever.

Measure Results

You must measure your system once it is in place. In order to do this you’ll need to have metrics and reports that provide the pulse of what is happening. These measurements should allow you to tweak your system and react to customer needs quickly. A truly efficient system will allow adjustments that continually improve results.

Understanding Customers

You’ll make the sale when your message directly speaks to the customers’ needs. You can tailor your copy writing and marketing by creating “personas for the different types of customers you have.

My favorite part of this book was the chapter titled “The Human Operating System which dives into the details of four customer temperaments. The Eisenbergs teach you how to sell to each of these types of people by understanding their individual triggers. I thought the book was worth it just for this chapter.

Joe’s Recommendation

Buy a Copy – This book contains solid principles that will reform your marketing efforts. Waiting for Your Cat to Bark will make a great first-time read and a ready reference on your shelf as you continue to optimize and improve your business processes.

Buy Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing from Amazon.com

Have you read Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? Tell us what you thought in the comments below.

• Big List of Things Not to Say —
  Solid collection of phrases you should never say to a customer.
• Traceability, Visibility, & Order Pipeline of Events —
  Your customers want to know the status of their order or when you’ll deliver your promised service. Accurate visibility into your processes and systems is key.
• Top 13 Marketing Budget Wastes—and How to Avoid Them —
  Are you wasting money through inefficient marketing?
• Has Frys Electronics Missed the Boat? —
  Great example of why you need to make your online and brick-and-mortar businesses seamless. Customers view you as one company, not two distinct entities.
• It’s the features that sell products —
  "According to Donald Norman, features always win over simplicity. Given a choice, people will buy the product that does more, even when they realize that it is accompanied by more complexity."
• 10 Ways to Wow Your Customers —
  A little effort on your part goes a long way with customers. Wow them today!
• The Complexity of Simplicity :: UXmatters —
  Keeping things simple isn’t always as easy as it sounds. This article highlights three points you should keep in mind.
• Packaging Design for Web-based Products —
  Digital Web Magazine article by information architect guru Luke Wroblewski outlines some best practices for designing your website or web application.
• How To Lose Customers in ten simple steps —
  Please be sure you’re not doing these things at your company.
• Ten Questions With Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell —
  Favorite customer evangelist authors talk about citizen marketers and their new book.

I installed Google Desktop on my computer the other day. During any software installation, you always see several screens of instructions, legal mumbo-jumbo, or the like. Usually I just breeze through those as fast as I can.

However, with this installation, Google forced me to take a second look:

They successfully broke up the mundane with their bright red statement:

Please read this carefully. It’s not the usual yada yada.

This simple yet powerful mechanism worked for me. I actually read the paragraph I would have otherwise skipped.

Customers will bring past experience and behaviors to your product or service. If they see a familiar pattern in your product, they may revert to past behavior and go on autopilot. You’ll need to be aware of these patterns in your industry and keep your customer on the right track. This can be done with distinct design elements or even clever copywriting like Google’s example.

Are your products or services prone to customers going on autopilot? Can that lead them into trouble? Take a look at your offerings and find how you can help your customers see what they may otherwise overlook or intentionally skip.

We recently bought a Little Tikes slide for our boys. Since we made our purchase via a listing on Craigslist, we didn’t get any assembly instructions.

I came home and found the pieces nearly impossible to assemble. I went online and found the manufacturer’s website and the actual product page. Fortunately for me, they had an “instructions” tab that offered step-by-step assembly diagrams. They worked great and the slide has already been put to good use.

Customers will often return to the point of sale seeking manuals, instructions, or support.

On the web, you can easily incorporate these elements in the product pages where you sell your merchandise. Don’t overlook customer support post-sale, as that is often the time they need you the most.

If customers can’t find the help they need from where they made their purchase, they may find comfort in the arms of a competitor who does provide superior support.

Even though customers may buy your product via third parties or used, your supporting relationship with them will influence future purchases of your product.

I was booting up my computer the other day when my Norton firewall prompted me that it was time for a renewal. This message came in the form of the concise little window you see here:

Norton could have just asked if I wanted to renew my subscription. However, they didn’t stop there. They threw in this little gem:

You have been protected against 72986 viruses over the last 707 days.

That sentence alone made me think: “Wow, that is a lot of viruses. What would happen if I didn’t renew?”

No Freebies

You can’t assume you’ll retain current customers when it comes time to renew their service or buy from you again. You need to be prepared to re-earn their business.

Reminders

Help the customer remember all the beautiful benefits they enjoyed because they used your product. Norton reminded me of the security I may have taken for granted. Help the customer recall the pain they felt before they found you and the joy they’ve had since their initial purchase.

The Future

Customers will renew or buy from you again when they don’t like the vision of the future without you in it. I don’t really want 70,000 new viruses getting through to my computer next year. So what do I do? I renew my subscription.

Persuasion

Paint two pictures: one with your product and its related benefits and one without it accompanied by the negative consequences.

You don’t have to spell everything out for customers. Spark their imagination or help them doubt your competition and you may just re-win their business.

My wife recently ordered some greeting cards from Current. One package of 30 cards only had 29.

Lesson #1: Lack of quality control will lead to more overhead in supporting customers after the sale.

Lesson #2: It is fine to work on improving customer service but don’t neglect the root causes of problems. Fixing those up front will alleviate a lot of the downstream issues you face everyday.

To solve her problem, my wife called Current’s phone number on the shipping invoice.

An automated message greeted her:

Due to high call volume, please call back in 1-2 hours.

She called back a few more times over the next week and got the same message every time.

Lesson #3: Don’t leave the follow-up to the customer. If you’re too busy to help a customer right now, they need alternatives or a proactive, scheduled response from you later. If you leave it up to the customer, they may walk away disgruntled and unsatisfied. Not everyone is as persistent as my wife!

Frustrated, my wife pulled up her order confirmation email. This had a different phone number that actually got her through to the company.

Lesson #4: Be consistently reachable. Ideally, you’d have one phone number that everyone can use to reach you. In reality, you may have several different phone numbers. These may be for different departments or even so you can track the source of incoming calls. No matter how many phone numbers you publish on the web, in emails, or your packaging, they better all work and connect customers to you!

After my wife explained the situation to the Current representative, she was told:

I can take care of that for you.

Lesson #5: Let your employees solve customer problems. If they have to defer to others or need approval to appease the customer, precious time and effort is wasted.

My wife was told:

Sorry, we’re out of stock of that item right now. What I can do is offer you a $2 coupon off your next purchase. Would that be OK?

Lesson #6: Focus on what the customer wants to hear. Tom Vander Well lists several things you should never say to a customer. Most of these include telling the customer “no” or “I can’t.” So tell them what you can do, keep it positive and work towards a solution.

My wife was happy with the coupon and the problem was solved. We’ll surely shop with them again especially since we now have a coupon beckoning us to buy.

Lesson #7: Not all problems can be solved with a coupon for future purchases. Your customer may be so mad they don’t want anything to do with you again and just want a refund. That’s fine because in this situation, a coupon may just be a slap in the face. Be sure to adjust your response based on the customer’s situation and attitude.

Read the previous issue of Call Center Chronicles, Episode 1: Nabisco

I saw an email the other day announcing some changes at a credit card company. The bottom of the email read:

Please do not reply to this e-mail. If you have inquiries or comments, please write to us at MBNA America, 1100 North King Street, P.O. Box 15266, Wilmington, DE 19850.

Who responds to an email via the snail mail postal service? This would appear to be a clear attempt to avoid customer contact.

I’ve talked before about the fallacies of not allowing customers to respond to emails. Customer service blog Service Untitled outlines some of the benefits that allowing people to respond directly to your email provides:

• Usually easier for the customer.
• Customers appreciate it when companies are easy to contact.
• Representatives can tell what customer is talking about (customers can easily quote the part they are unsure about, preserve the subject, etc.)
• More chances to wow a customer with great customer service.

Sure, there may be some logistical challenges in handling the volume of customer feedback. But how you regard these challenges will tell you exactly what value you place on your customers. If you care about your customers, don’t distance yourself from them by hiding behind difficult communication channels.

If your customers aren’t able to reach you, their money may just end up reaching a competitor instead.