Listening and Responding to Customers
I’m in Naples, FL attending the annual spring conference of PRSA’s Counselor’s Academy. It is a great opportunity to meet with other agency owners and learn from each other. Attended an interesting session this morning with Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen Online. One of the big takeaways for me was the disconnect between marketing and our client’s operations. We say “talk to us,” “tell us more,” and “we like to listen”. But many clients have no method of actually delivering on this promise. Their customer service, if they have one, is trained to provide minimal communication. They aren’t listening and they aren’t empowered to be responsive or empathetic. Closing the gap between brand operations and marketing is going to be a challenging task as marketers continue to look for more and better ways to communicate directly with customers. Seems like there needs to be a shift in how outward facing employees are trained. A good first step would be for them to actually know what the marketing messages are and what types of feedback customers are giving.
NOTHING will turn me off faster from a company than poor customer service. Poor customer service tells me that the company respects it’s bottom line more than it respects it’s customers. All companies will devise their business strategy around a bottom line, but please, at least try and have good customer service as the means to a better bottom line.
Four years ago while buying a bed, I went around and around and around and around….with Macy’s Home Furnishing. Take all the bad customer service experiences you have ever had in your life, and then double it–you are now halfway to the point which I reached over a single 8 week episode. I won’t shop at Macy’s home furnishings ever again. And I tell everyone I can to not shop there. I tell them because 1) it is the only true power I have in “getting back at them” and 2) I wouldn’t wish my experience on anyone–it was that inhumane.
Millions of dollars spent getting me to shop, and buy, at Macy’s. And a poor investment in customer service loses me, for life.
BTW: I should have listened to a former coworker when she told me not to buy at Macy’s because she had a bad experience buying a chair. Doh!
Lastly (you can see I have a lot of pent up aggression on this topic) I HATE when websites are designed so that it is virtually, or fundamentally, impossible to find a phone number to talk to a person. It’s almost like a game: “The only way you are finding on this website, or tracking down by some other means, our phone number is if you have the determination that can only be a result of reaching an 11 on the 1-10 scale of being pissed off right now.”
A great example of a site that gets it right is Zappos, Phone number at the top, phone number in the middle and just below that a link for live support. Plus they are twittering. They really know how to communicate.