Amazing customer service experiences start with these 6 easy tips.

Your product or service exists to delight the person using them.

You will spend the lifetime of your business finding ways to fund production, build the product, distribute it, promote it, and iterate the product to make it better. You’ll create other products or features to expand your offerings. You’ll hire, contract or outsource people to support each of these roles. You’ll need production, manufacturing, finance, sales, marketing, supply chains, partnership, and then management to keep it all running and achieve an increasing company value and profit margin. But I’m blown away by how quickly companies forget about the people using their products.

I’ll admit customer service is more distributed than ever. There’s social media, chat, support forms, texting, and call centers. This is the obvious list. What’s forgotten is that customer service includes every time that the customer touches the brand. Every time that they interact with someone or something that represents the business. Great customer service is about creating brand promoters for your business. Companies that consider creating an incredible customer service experience will likely create a customer relationship that transcends the sale and promotes future success.

6 things to consider to make your customer service experience amazing.

1. Believe in your product. Be confident and delighted to share how your services or products are either the best in the world or are striving to be so. If you don’t have this confidence in the product you’re selling, you’re either faking it until your product becomes better, or you’re just lying. If your product is the best, joyfully tell everyone you meet! If you’re faking it in order to move forward and become better, AWESOME! Keep it up! And be sincere. If you’re lying and are convinced that your product or service does not provide value. Stop now. Go find something else in life to do.
2. Follow up with everyone. In the early days of your product you should be replying to absolutely every single touch point that anyone has with your experience. If someone is talking about you on social media, follow up with a “thanks.” If it’s negative, follow up with an apology and a commitment to make the product better. If they email you, email them back quickly. If they call you, answer the phone. If they write you a handwritten letter, write them a letter back. You are building relationships with your customers and need to treat them like the next love of your life.
3. Train your team to be ambassadors. This is a big one that we see people miss a lot. The owners or sales team do a great job of sharing the vision and the value of the solution the company is offering. But then you hear someone else on the team talking about the company and they can’t quite explain the solution’s unique value proposition. Train your team on the short scripts that describe what you do or what your product does. Keep it simple and effective. Create language that prepares them for how to respond to common questions. Use analogies to help them connect your new concepts to existing solutions they may be familiar with. Doing so will result in customer ambassadors for your product or service.
4. Make your experiences personal. Personal touches make customers feel like a king/queen. Write hand-written letters addressing the person and what you know or remember about them. Send personalized gifts. SWAG is great and can go a long way, but a special gift that is unique to the individual will create a life-long fan of your brand. Do they like sports? Find out which team. Get them tickets, jerseys, autographs, meet and greets, etc. For me it’s coffee (or scotch :)). Asana sent me their standard SWAG kit with a little mug and Blue Bottle coffee all because I explained to them that our company name is based on coffee and we love it around here. This doesn’t have to be expensive, it just needs to be thoughtful.
5. Entertain your customers. It doesn’t matter if you have a scaling tech company or a lawn mowing business. People want to be entertained. Let your company have a personality that creates moments that are memorable. Feel free to be silly, but be sure to make it sincere. Treat your customers to lunch, coffee, or dinner or a special event. Create content or promotions that have something your customers would likely share. Create moments that will make your customers smile.
6. Be Fast. Customers expect results quickly. Providing the right solution in an appropriate amount of time is important to many customers. It makes customers feel like they are a priority.

Some Examples:

DSTLD (Formerly 20 Jeans) sent a personal note with their raw denim jeans congratulating me on being smarter than my friends for not overspending on my jeans. I was entertained and it stood out as a nice personal touch. I then accidentally shrank these jeans because I was a nube to raw denim. They went above and beyond to credit me for a new pair. I told everyone about the service, and I know at least two people that purchased from them after me telling these stories.

Chick-fil-A does an incredible job training their employees in customer service. They smile constantly. If you say “Thanks”, they don’t reply with “No problem” as if I were thinking it was a problem to serve the food I paid for. They don’t reply with the McDonalds or Wendy’s response….silence and walking away or sliding the window closed. No. Chick-fil-A responds with “My pleasure!” and a smile. They’ve learned the habit of responding to people with an attitude that says, “I’m glad that you are paying for the services that we are working hard to provide you! We hope that this is the best fast food experience you will ever have.” And it’s consistent across all of their employees. You may not even notice this at first, but this is what makes it AMAZING. They are creating an amazing experience without you even having to think about it.

Asana follows up often with a personal email to make sure that we are having a good experience. They have team members that respond quickly to support requests and go above-and-beyond to make sure that existing clients still love the product. They are so thankful for feedback. Both positive and negative. They give us early access to new features. We constantly refer people to use the product and even help train people looking to use it as a solution because the product great, and being one of their customers is great as well!

Modern customer service experiences have become so much more dynamic than in the past. Customers have more choices than they have ever had in the past. They want to get the right product AND have a great experience when buying it. Companies with great customer service, no matter how complex the business, become winners. Businesses with great customer service win their customers’ hearts. These tips are the step in the right direction for any company looking to ramp up their service game.