How to be Great at Customer Service
Micah Solomon is one of the best resource persons out there on Customer Service. He breathes and lives the “Customer-Service” life. You can check out his LinkedIn profile and see all the glowing recommendations that people has given him.
In this highly insightful interview, he shares with us key principles behind what defines customer service for the customer.
What do you mean when you say everyone in a company should “do” customer service?
“Everyone” here is shorthand for “everyone, to the extent of their abilities, to the extent of their trainability and to the extent they interact with customers.”
The picture of customer service we all need to get out of our heads — and out of our businesses — is the old, compartmentalized version: an isolated clerk on an upper floor of a venerable department store, where customers have to schlep their returns to get an adjustment.
Teach Joan in Sales and Jeff in Shipping how they themselves can initiate a service recovery. Jeff may not be the right person ultimately to fix the problem, but if he encounters an unsatisfied customer, he needs to know how to do more than say ‘‘I can’t help you, I just send boxes.’’ Even Dale, who cleans the toilets, should be empowered beyond helpless reactions like ‘‘Um, you’d need to ask a manager about that.’’
Customers hate to hear ‘‘You need to ask a manager.’’
Dale will feel better about himself and your company, his customer will feel better about herself and your company, and service problems will tend to turn out better if Dale has been trained to express confident enthusiasm: ‘‘Certainly, I am so sorry. I will help you with that,’’ followed by finding the right person to solve the problem (even if that does happen to be, in fact, a manager).
If there is one key to great customer service, what is it?
Merely good customer service (service likely to create customer satisfaction) means getting the basics right. The basics of satisfactory service are fourfold:
1) A perfect (i.e., defect-free within foreseeable) product,
2) delivered by a caring person,
3) in a timely manner,
4) with the support, if anything goes wrong, of an effective problem resolution process.
These basics themselves are far from easy to pull off, but they are only the prerequisites for staying in the service game. In and of themselves, they will not command customer loyalty. Great customer service, which is what your question asked about, means anticipatory customer service: being so attuned to your customers that you know, before being asked, what your customers are looking for. This ability can come about from many different factors, and you need to attack the effort from many different angles.
People, for example, want you to realize they’re thirsty before they have to track you down to ask for water, yet they don’t want to be hassled by a waiter constantly interrupting their conversations to inquire. (This is what I like to call “The Artie Bucco Syndrome,” named after the intrusive restaurateur character on The Sopranos).
So, how do you resolve this? (The answer is a combination of extremely careful hiring for traits and extensive training for sensitivity.) Most of all, people want you to know them as an individual, not as part of an aggregation, not as a “slice of a market.” Yet, how can you know everyone you serve as an individual and still grow your business to a reasonable scale? (Your solution is undoubtedly going to involve cleverly designed software and hiring, but more than anything, it requires the corporate will to stress over and over that this is an important and overarching goal to be concentrated on by the company and all who work there.)
How do you suggest handling an angry customer?
A key is to think of yourself as a parent comforting a toddler who has taken a spill, rather than as a lawyer grilling a defendant. “Fairness,” “Striving for justice,” and all those great courtroom terms and phrases simply shouldn’t enter into your dealings with a customer. Instead, accepting blame, apologizing, continuing the apology literally until the customer tells you “it’s not really all that bad” and lets you then get on with achieving a resolution: these are the keys. Defending yourself, picking holes in the story of your customer: you’ll inevitably lose both the argument and the customer.
Here’s an easy-to-remember method that works in many service situations. It’s called “the a-b-c method of instant customer pacification.” As follows:
a) “Please forgive me.”
b) “Let me address your issues.”
c) Then, fix it in 20 minutes or follow up in 20 minutes to tell what your progress is.
Note: even service professionals who succeed in getting parts a) and b) right tend to forget about part c). You can’t. You may think you’ve have handed the resolution off to the most competent person in the world, with far greater specific expertise than you. But if you initiated the resolution of the issue for your customer, your customer wants to hear back from you.
You need to circle back around and let the customer know you have checked on the progress of the resolution. (Plus, you’re likely to be surprised how many times you find out things have not actually been resolved — and thus you’ll have a chance to run interference before the customer is lost forever.)
How can business leaders and management provide their primary customers (which we believe are their employees) better customer service?
These is indeed value, as you suggest, for business leaders to consider employees as their customers and to have a service attitude toward them. However, I think this is a deeper issue, and that “Customer service” is not exactly a fully-encompassing term for what business leaders and management need to provide to their employees.
The issue is to create a work environment in which your employees have a true chance to flourish. To create an environment that provides employees an understanding of the purpose of their work in the larger scheme, the proper tools to do their work, and enough control over the design of their work that they will say to themselves “all in all, even though maybe not having to work at all might be preferable, if I do need to have a job, this is the job I want.”
Otherwise, you are wasting the life of your employee — and more likely than not, your own — for all the hours you spend at work. (Plus, you can trust me on the following: You will not get optimal customer service if you are using your employees only for their labor, not fully engaging their minds and hearts in the design and deeper purpose of their work for you.)
Tell us more when you were starting Oasis Disc Manufacturing. How different are your services to others in the industry?
I started Oasis Disc Manufacturing first as a recording studio, which later grew into the CD and DVD manufacturing and promotion company that it is today. I was a young musician and sound engineer trying to achieve success and excellence on a shoestring budget.
As a musician myself, I knew what independent musicians in general needed: they needed what major label artists needed: professional manufacturing, proper mastering, real distribution, radio promotion, and more.
That’s what led me to create Oasis. Starting in the tiny basement of my first home, I worked to build a safe and welcoming place where independent musicians, filmmakers, and other content creators would receive the highest quality manufacturing, personal attention, expert advice, and much-needed promotion and distribution.
Plus, I created a customer service and sales approach which uniquely allowed Oasis to grow quickly and profitably, without ever losing its one-on-one approach to acknowledging and honoring customer preferences.
My wonderful co-writer Leonardo Inghilleri, one of the guiding lights of The Ritz-Carlton and now of Capella Hotels and Resorts has a similar approach, and together we have articulated this as The Anticipatory Customer Service Method and described it in our new book, Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization, which is now available here.
Who are your top business champions on customer service?
I have to tip my hat to the heroes of the quality improvement movement, which is largely a movement in manufacturing, but has great potential to improve service as well — if applied with a sensitive touch. Much can be learned, in general, from manufacturing for how to deal with data rather than just hunches. Truly I have nothing against “hunches” — a hunch by a seasoned service professional contains much more than it seems on the surface — but systematic quality improvement is crucial as well, and it is the leaders in manufacturing who really have shown the way in this area.
I also want to tip my hat to the people who work with me at Oasis. They do an amazing job at turning customers into friends. As far as businesses that provide exceptional service, some that we mention in the book are:
• The ESF camps, which provide such wonderful service that when families move to a new area the parents act as a pro bono “advance team” finding a proper location, signing up new campers, and ensuring the success of the camps there
• Friends School Haverford in Pennsylvania where administrator Beth Krick truly makes kids (and parents) feel personally welcomed back when they return after an absence
• The Inn At Little Washington, a glorious 5-star restaurant in Virginia where the level of a customer’s happiness is discreetly tracked in real time during the course of one’s visit, with the goal of ensuring that everyone leaves happy (and where Leonardo and I had a few delicious “research” dinners while writing our book)
• Netflix, which set up a call center near Portland to encourage telephone contact with customers at a time when the rest of the industry was discouraging it
• Online retailer CD Baby, where what could be a mundane shipping confirmation letter is turned into a chance to bond closely with a customer.
What are YOU hungry for?
A bagel and a schmear.
About Micah Solomon
MICAH SOLOMON ’87 is President of Oasis Disc Manufacturing, the company he famously built up from a one-room operation into a leader in the entertainment and technology industries. His techniques and achievements have been featured in Success magazine, Seth Godin’s bestseller Purple Cow, and in other case studies and profiles in the business press. The founder of the College of The Customer website (www.collegeofthecustomer.com), Micah is a sought-after business advisor and speaker.
Micah is co-author of the upcoming-April-release Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization, with Leonardo Inghilleri of The Ritz-Carlton (emeritus) and West Paces Consulting, foreword by Horst Schulze, Founding President and COO of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. Publication is by AMACOM Books (The American Management Association) and distributed internationally by McGraw-Hill Books. Micah’s personal website is www.micahsolomon.com and he can be reached by email at micah@micahsolomon.com.
