• Sutori: The voice of today’s customer —
  I got an email about this site which allows people to share their customer experiences and have others add their own thoughts. It seems Sutori’s goal is to aggregate the opinions of many and then push for change at the poor performing companies. A worthy goal that hopefully comes to fruition.
• Are You Managing Metrics or Serving Customers? —
  Numbers don’t always tell the truth. The real reasons customers have trouble may be masked from upper management simply because of the way these issues are classified and aggregated.

Think back to when you were in school or college. Remember your professor telling you that if you have a question, you should ask because odds are the person next to you has the same one?

The same is true of your customers. If one of them has a question, doubt, concern, or problem, there is a good chance others are feeling the pain too.

I was recently researching the User Interface Conference I’d like to attend in the fall. In checking their website, the information still only showed their 2006 schedule.

I emailed the folks behind the conference, User Interface Engineering (UIE), and asked when their conference would be this year.

First thing the next morning, I got a reply answering my questions.

Later that same day I saw a post on UIE’s very own blog announcing the upcoming conference and that details would be soon forthcoming.

Was it coincidence that my email, UIE’s response, and then their blog post all seemed to fall one after the other?

Or did my initial email spark the need to publicly inform everyone?

Regardless of what prompted their blog post, the sequence of events highlights an important concept that your business should be practicing.

When you hear from a customer, take an honest look at their questions. Would these questions and the answers help other customers or clients? If so, get that information out there publicly. You can send out the answers in a newsletter, post them to your blog, or add them to your help documentation.

If you find yourself answering the same questions over and over again, this is a sign that you may have waited too long to communicate the facts publicly.

On my website dedicated to Chile, I get lots of questions from people all around the world. I try to post these questions and answers to the site. I’ve found that this reduces the repetition of questions and adds some good content to my site that then attracts new people via search engines.

Remember: if one of your customers has a question, odds are there are others who silently have the same ones.

How often do you come home and see some type of advertising flier on your doorstep? It seems we get those almost every day.

How can your business stand out from such a continual stream of propaganda delivered straight to potential customers’ doors? How do you cut through the clutter and get noticed?

Marketing to the Doorstep

The other day I came home and noticed a little flower pot on the front step. It was positioned in the middle of the sidewalk up to our house so as not to be missed. I thought this was an odd place to put it and asked my wife about it.

She didn’t know it was there. Oh, I thought, it must be from a neighbor. However, that was wrong too.

Marketing That Makes You Look

When we went out to pick it up we noticed that all the neighbors had them on their front steps too.

The flower was a gift from the new Capital One bank branch that was opening near my neighborhood.

Through their clever flower marketing, Capital One got the attention that their junk-mail-sending competitors didn’t.

Capital One’s marketing effort got our attention and your advertising campaigns can too:

• Be where the customer can’t help but notice you – Capital One’s flower advertisement was unavoidably in the middle of my sidewalk
• Avoid traditional advertising delivery methods – If your message always come in the mail, over the television, or via paper fliers on my door, odds are you’re going in the trash or being ignored. Be different and you’ll get people to notice you.
• Give something of value – The flower gift we got was not expensive but it did have value. Who throws away a flower? No, you plant it. How often does your advertising and marketing message come attached to something that the recipient inherently values?

Marketing with Flare

Your customers are continually bombarded with marketing and advertising. You need to not only have a message that stands out from the competition but one that actually attracts the customer’s attention.

Once attention is earned, your message can deliver its payload and persuade the customer to take action.

One of the best panel sessions I attended at this year’s SXSW Interactive was Customer Service is the New Marketing. This panel featured speakers from shoe retailer Zappos, photo site Flickr, online calendar service 30 Boxes and Satisfaction.

The moderator, Thor Muller, has posted a recap of his presentation on his blog.

Zappos is Customer Service

The power house of customer service on this panel was Zappos. I was blown away at how dedicated they are in caring for the customer.

They made a conscious decision to spend money on the customer experience instead of marketing. The resulting word of mouth marketing has significantly grown their business. Zappos’ Tony Hsieh went through several things they do to provide a superb customer experience:

• Toll free number available 24/7
• Free overnight shipping both ways: for your order and returns
• 365 day return policy
• Fast, accurate fulfillment
• Friendly, helpful “above and beyond” service
• Will occasionally direct customers to competitor if Zappos can’t help them.
• Call center employees don’t have set scripts, they are instructed to customize the interaction with the customer and think for themselves. Call reps should talk on the phone like they would with their neighbor.
• Call center doesn’t have “call times” or sales-based performance goals. This allows the call reps to focus on the customer and not some impersonal number goal.
• Zappos started by only selling drop-shipped products. As they ramped up internal inventory, they saw they could only give the best customer service on products they directly sent the customer. It reached the point where they chose to focus on the customer and gave up 25% of their revenue (all from drop ship) to focus on only products they inventoried.
• Every employee, irregardless of position, goes through a four-week training, including phone time, to help them best fit the culture and know how to serve customers.

It is OK to apologize

You can admit mistakes. The very act of doing so will help generate trust with your customers.

Several panelists reminded us that it is OK to admit fault, and say “I’m sorry.” By making that statement, you’ll often lessen tension with the customer.

Handing Support Issues

You don’t have to fix everything. Some things are outside your control. If you explain the situation to the customer, odds are they will understand and may even help you fix the issue.

Flickr’s Heather Champ has a sticker on her keyboard that reads: “soft, pleasing tone of voice.” This reminder helps her stay calm when customers get irate. You need to have guidelines that you can’t let people cross. When they do, “don’t fall for the bait” and feed their anger by responding in kind. Remember: “soft, pleasing tone of voice.”

If you fix bugs in your software or process quickly, they won’t build up and affect more people.

Lessons Learned

Zappos’ Hsieh said that retail companies can compete at three main things: selection, price, or service. At most, you’ll get two of the three. You have to decide which ones you want to focus on. Zappos has chosen selection and service. By so doing they knowingly lose many price-centric customers (and that is OK!).

When your company decides how it will focus your efforts, remember, you can’t be everything to everyone. In order to provide a memorable and loyalty building customer experience, you can’t neglect the “service” part of the equation.

Andy Sernovitz, founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, delivers an amazing step-by-step guide to building word of mouth buzz around your company and products in his Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking,

In keeping with the principles Sernovitz outlines in his book, the companion website wordofmouthbook.com has a plethora of information to peak your interest.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Manifesto

1. Happy customers are your best advertising. Make people happy.
2. Marketing is easy: Earn the respect and recommendation of your
   customers. They will do your marketing for you, for free.
3. Ethics and good service come first.
4. UR the UE: You are the user experience (not what your ads say you are).
5. Negative word of mouth is an opportunity. Listen and learn.
6. People are already talking. Your only option is to join the conversation.
7. Be interesting or be invisible.
8. If it’s not worth talking about, it’s not worth doing.
9. Make the story of your company a good one.
10. It is more fun to work at a company that people want to talk about.
11. Use the power of word of mouth to make business treat people better.
12. Honest marketing makes more money.

The book takes you through the basics of word of mouth marketing and then jumps right into practical tips you can start implementing today. In fact, the author guarantees that after reading his book, you can pick one of his techniques and start seeing an immediate increase in attention to your company.

Joe’s Recommendation

Buy a Copy – Word of Mouth Marketing is a short-yet-solid manual on leveraging the power of your customers and others to do your marketing for you. You can foster these marketing efforts and see your business bloom significantly more than if you try to do everything yourself.

Buy Word of Mouth Marketing from Amazon.com.

• Convince me in Five Words or Less! —
  Steps on how you can create a catchy, memorable, and effective tag line or slogan for your business.
• The Difference Between Usability and User Experience —
  Creating a great user experience means coordinating efforts across your entire organization. If customers hit snags as they move between your internal department boundaries, you’re missing the holistic picture!
• More Design Lessons from the Tooth Fairy —
  Wonderful account of business lessons learned from a Dad’s interactions with his daughter when the Tooth Fairy forgot to visit. Your customers, like the little girl in this story, have preset expectations and need to be cared for when things go awry.

Surely your business, factory, or staff can only handle a certain transaction volume. At some point, you’ll reach the physical limits of how many customers you can process at one location.

When will that time come? That may be hard to say. However, that limit will be preceeded by some really busy times.

During these busy times, you can (and should) still deliver quality service to your customers.

Break from the Norm

The last time I went through the drive-thru at fast food restaurant Chick-fil-a, it was during the lunch rush. Cars formed a long and winding snake all through the parking lot.

As I waited my turn, I saw a few Chick-fil-a employees walking down the line of cars. The first girl reached my car, well before I got to the menu board and ordering intercom.

She asked what I would like. I asked if they still had my favorite chicken sandwich. She confirmed that they did, took my order and wrote down some shorthand on a piece of paper. After handing me the paper, she pointed me on to the next employee who was waiting up ahead.

I pulled up to the next girl who took my paper and read my order out loud, translating the short hand so I could confirm that is what I wanted.

She paused for a second and then gave me my total price. It had the appearance that she pulled that number out of her head. In reality, she had a microphone hidden under her jacket and was communicating with the people inside. Very clever.

This Chick-fil-a location was about as busy as physically possible. However, the management had decided to help speed things along by thinking outside their normal operations. Traditionally, cars pull up to the menu and then take a few minutes to decide what to order. In this situation, management put employees outside and helped buffer the decision delay by walking down the line.

Be Flexible & Creative

Chick-fil-a ditched the computer and gave pens and paper to employees who had memorized the menu. A non-traditional solution to the problem at hand.

Just because your company may be squeezed into a physical location or certain time constraints doesn’t mean you can’t be creative in problem solving.

Think outside your constraints. Be creative. It is fine to go low-tech to solve your problems. High-tech or low-tech, doing what it takes to keep your customers happy will keep them coming back for more.

• In-N-Out Burger: No Buns about Good Business —
  Some observations about how this fast food chain has distinguished itself from the competition and managed to grow a loyal fan base.
• T-Mobile Suddenly Gets Online Customer Service —
  Wonderful examples of personally crafted customer service emails. The author concedes "it’s amazing these messages must be mostly pre-written and yet they are so custom focused to just my problem they are perfect."

Have you ever been so busy that your customers start feeling the pain?

This situation may be exacerbated when you have to address some customer service issues. A delay in getting a customer through your queue can leave the others who wait frustrated.

On a recent trip to the grocery store when it came time to pay, my wife was having some trouble with coupons and subsequent questions. The cashier escalated this issue to her manager. The manager then electronically transferred the transaction to another register. My wife and her cart full of groceries, all packed and bagged, left her current cashier and followed the manager to the other station.

The customers that were waiting behind my wife were then able to proceed through the checkout. Simultaneously, the manager assisted my wife and resolved the issue.

The manager here recognized two things. First, the customer (my wife) needed some time and attention. Second, others were stuck waiting for the issue to be resolved.

When you start dealing with customer issues, don’t forget all your other customers! How can you call in backup so you can deal with both the current issue and everyone else that is clamoring for your attention?

Every time I stop at a Valero gas station, the pump screen asks me for my zip code. Since I have no other choice but to enter it, I do.

On my last trip to an Exxon gas station, I saw a sign above the pump. This sign stated that they’d ask for my billing address zip code when I swiped my credit card. This information would be used to help prevent fraud.

I can assume Valero was asking me for the same reasons. However, they didn’t explain why they were asking. I was thus left to guess their intentions. Exxon, on the other hand, actually informed me that they were helping me.

If you’re doing something to help your customer, take that opportunity to inform them of that fact! This will ease any hesitancy of providing extra information and will build goodwill with the customer.