The Customer Is Always Right: A Dangerous Platitude for Small Businesses

By Erin Sherbert, Content Marketing Manager, Salesforce

If you’re a consumer of anything, you’ve heard this phrase before, but how often has it rung true for you? Truth be told, it’s impossible for service reps to take every piece of feedback from customers and incorporate into their business model.

For that reason, businesses need to stop making the claim “the customer is always right,” and instead define their customer experience values as a company. Yes, you should listen to all feedback, but only incorporate the feedback that aligns with your core service values.

We recently spoke with Jonathan Hunt, COO for Desk.com, who talked about other ways small businesses can to refine their customer service strategy as they look to grow.

Can you define what exactly a customer service strategy is? How does day-to-day business operations work into that strategy?

Customer service strategy encompasses how you are going to deliver a differentiated customer experience for your brand. Key questions to ask yourself as an SMB when thinking about your support strategy are:

1. What are your core principles/values?
2. What do you want your customers to experience across the customer lifecycle?
3. How can you best communicate your brand through those interactions?

Business operations should work across sales, service and support, etc. to ensure all these groups are enabled to deliver the desired customer experience across all touch points. For example, collaborating with functional executives to develop and implement the end-to-end customer service strategy & operating models, delivering the systems and processes to serve up the right information at the right time based on the customer and use case, etc.

What are some signs that a business needs to redefine its customer service strategy from an operational perspective?

The most obvious one is a spike in attrition or a dip in customer expansion. That said, by the time those metrics manifest, you have already lost. Every customer support interaction your team has should be used as an opportunity to delight them, not disappoint.

Capturing CSAT (customer satisfaction scores) on key interactions — such as closing a case — and monitoring usage and feature adoption can be leading indicators for seeing when your customers are delighted or disappointed with those updates, and may require a shift in customer service strategy.

What are 3 things small businesses can do to refine their customer service operations?

Invest in your post sales organization from day 1: The most important principle in customer service strategy is to fully enable your employees to successfully deliver the desired customer experience. This is often overlooked and the customer service organization is seen as a cost center rather than a revenue driver. My strong advice is to invest in the post-sales organization early in your company evolution.

Turn on the headlights: Proactively monitoring customer engagement, CSAT, and other KPIs allows you keep your fingers on the pulse of your customer base health. This is not rocket science, but it is amazing how many companies don’t regularly set targets and review performance on key customer success KPIs

Fully map out your customer journey: Know what the lifecycle of your customer is and the key experiences you are trying to deliver at every touch point. The worst customer experiences come from companies where they only focus on major touch points like the beginning and end of customer’s lifecycle, but not the entire journey. Think about things that will help with customer happiness and retention: How do delight customers with and drive adoption of new features ? What types of resources do they need after initial onboarding? Are you hosting regular meetups and check-ins with customers to drive your customers’ success?

What is the best advice you’ve ever received and why?

Most important asset is your people — recruit the best, invest in them early, and set them up for success. This is the highest ROI investment you can make as a growing company.

What are the most common issues businesses struggle with when it comes to providing great customer service?

A lot of times with SMBs, customer support is an afterthought or checklist item, when in reality, it needs to be a critical part of your go-to-market strategy. Early on, companies focus on product and distribution at the expense of post-sales service and support; resulting in elevated customer attrition, negative NPS, and ultimately revenue headwinds.

Customer support is thought of as a cost-center when it should be thought of as a revenue-center focused on retaining customers and growing your footprint with them. Start holistically from the beginning and think about how the lifecycle — sales, service/support — will help you grow revenue faster.

What role can a CRM play in refining your customer service operations?

CRM can be the one source of truth for customer data — everyone has a single view of what’s going on with customers. It helps you collect all the data you need to deliver the best possible service experience. Connecting sales, service, and marketing across the company gives you a single view of the customer.

For support and customer retention, having a connected system with CRM, plus customer service gives you early indicators on customer health prior to attrition.

Ever since I became a consumer (a long time ago), I‘ve heard the phrase: “the customer is always right” That seems to be a platitude. Can you talk a little bit about this phrase and what businesses can do to back it up.

This can be a dangerous platitude, especially for SMBs. When you have limited resources, it’s impossible to take every piece of feedback from customers and incorporate into your business.

From the very beginning, define your customer experience values as a company (i.e. easy onboarding, easy to do business with, etc.) and set boundaries as to what’s acceptable to incorporate. You want to make sure that everything you do always maps to those core values. While you should always listen to customer feedback, determine what extent you will use customer feedback for business decisions vs. relying entirely on it, and optimize business accordingly.

SMBs need to define brand and values early on to compete — if you are doing everything, you’re not doing anything meaningful. When you are financially constrained as a business, delighting customers is very important but shouldn’t impact your ability to grow.

To learn more about how your SMB can deliver fast, awesome customer service with Desk.com, sign up for a free trial today www.desk.com