Businesses often fail to recognize that the secret to success isn’t just the quality of their merchandise, their low prices or the attractive layout of their store, it’s also how they treat people.
When they ignore their customers, they do so at their own peril.
Consumers are a powerful lobby and have never been so well-informed. Thanks to social media, we can vent our frustrations for the world to see. Nearly every single consumer surveyed by American Express said they would readily share their opinions after a very positive or very negative encounter.
Nothing generates repeat business and increases traffic than good service and the word of mouth that follows it. When a plumber or hair salon treats you right, you’ll probably recommend them and give them more business. Three-fourths of consumers in that American Express survey said they went back for more because they’d had a good service experience.
On the flip side, chances are pretty good you’ll bail and never come back after a clerk ignores you while making chitchat with a co-worker or when a cable company rep gets testy over the phone. More than half the shoppers in that survey said they would walk away from an intended purchase because of poor customer service.
When the transaction doesn’t go as promised, many are determined to get some satisfaction. So far this year, the Better Business Bureau Serving Los Angeles has responded to 3.2 million consumer inquiries and processed 41,000 complaints.
It’s getting tougher for businesses to survive – with economic pressures, innovation, competition and increasing buyer sophistication. When commoditization of products is so prevalent, sometimes the only thing that differentiates a business from its competitors is its service culture.
Concept of courtesy
Unfortunately, civility is too often marginalized in the workplace. Staffs are stretched, turnover is great and managers barely take the time to train new employees – which would be a good time to introduce the concept of courtesy. Or, when they do, it isn’t reinforced every day. Good customer service is instilled at the top, it has to come from management and management has to walk the talk.
Customer service training seems like a modest investment when the stakes are so high. Genesys Labs and Datamonitor/Ovum report businesses in 16 major industrialized economies lose a total of $339 billion a year when customers defect due to poor customer experiences. That’s more than the combined revenue of Apple and General Electric in a year!
It’s downright daunting to a business owner who wonders how to make an increasingly demanding customer happy, and mystifying to a customer who just wants the clerk to be polite and address their issue. Many laudable attempts are made at bridging the gap between businesses with good intentions and customers with reasonable expectations. Plenty of M.B.A. courses, dissertations and white papers suggest how to “delight customers,” which seems to be the Holy Grail.
However, companies seem to have a tough time connecting the dots – identifying the correlation between great service and improved financial performance. Consequently, they have trouble justifying the investment in better systems and training. The Economist Intelligence Unit reports 84 percent of the companies it surveyed “believe that customer service is either very or moderately important to their financial performance but … struggle to recognize and measure its impact.”
Maybe we’re making it too complicated. Writing for Harvard Business Review, Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman and Nicholas Toman of the Corporate Executive Board made the shocking admission that “delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty.” Instead, they said, “reducing their effort – the work they must do to get their problem solved – does.”
As we all know, a pleasant and empathetic sales clerk or customer service rep is like a ray of sunshine. It’s refreshing when someone takes responsibility and says “I’ll handle this” or, better yet, “I’ve already taken care of it. You don’t have to do anything else.”
We don’t need research to tell us great service makes us feel good. But, leave it to researchers to find a correlation anyway. A recent study of consumers in the United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico and Australia detected significant changes in body chemistry during and after a positive service encounter – things like perspiration, breathing and heart rate.
The study also found that “on an emotional level, benefiting from great service triggers the same basic cerebral reactions as feeling loved.”
Who knew civility could be such a powerful thing?
Steve McFarland is the chief executive of the Better Business Bureau Serving Los Angeles.
