“The customer is always right” has been a mantra for customer service for decades. Companies does everything they can to make their customers happy, they are in a bidding war with no winners. I believe it is time to rethink customer service before it kills your business. I want to use this article to discuss the future of customer service, and I would appreciate your feedback on this topic. I do believe that customers should know that they are about to ruin their own experience.

4 types of customers

As I leader I have grown to believe that if I treat all equal, it will be unfair to everyone. This applies to customers as well, that is why you should understand that there are four interesting customer types as well. Some customers are very demanding and noisy others are quiet, polite and easy to deal with. Some spend a lot of money and some spend less or little money. Who gets the best deal from you? Imagine an unsatisfied customer calling you, shouting, demanding a free product, wants to talk to the manager and threatens to talk to media or use social media to spread the ugly truth about your customer service. He would most likely get a free product, most likely after talking to several managers. While other polite customers complains in a proper manner, they are in a good mood and ask in a friendly tone, when they are turned down they think; Oh well, at least I tried. Do you see how this is a mismatch with how we raise our kids?

You should strive to keep the polite, happy and quiet high spenders as your VIP customers.

You should get rid of the noisy, loud speaking, blackmailing low spenders. They will go to the competition and it is a win win situation for your company.

Why customers should applaud your new attitude

Most companies today are trying to please the unpleasable spending money and time trying to turn them around to happy customers. Dear customer, this is money that should be spent improving products or lowering prices for you. Dear company owner some will never be happy.

Make sure you can get rid of rude customers, and get a free bonus of happier staff members and more experience. People quit their job when they had enough. “Enough” can be a lot of different things but as always enough is enough. I had enough and a few drops spilled my glass, and I quit my job. The last drop might be one rude customer yelling at an employee and all of a sudden you might lose years of experience. The average “life span” of a call center employee might be as little as one year, and it might take more to get them to be good. Do you understand why customer service levels are low now? People quit their job before they become great. And where do some of them go? Yes, to your competition. So you might keep time demanding rude customers that cost you money, sending your good employees to your competition and getting more rude customers in return as your competition is turning them down. So the next time you yell at an useless employee, remember that this is the reason good employees find other jobs, leaving you doing business with “monkeys”.

“Customer service is a magnificent job, if it wasn’t for all the customers”. This is actually a fun quote referring to the loud ungrateful assholes that ruins your day. Imagine going to a major sporting event. Why is the security so high? Because some is ruining for others. Could less security lower ticket prices, so you could stop complaining about the high ticket prices? Yes, everything is connected.

Divide and Conquer

Some blind bats with high degrees and no compass still believe that customer support is expensive. This is because they spend time talking to the unhappy customers and jump by their bell. The quiet customers are being neglected and getting the worst deals. So company management is educating their customers to be loud. You might start with a happy quiet high spender, but after a few years he needs to become loud to get attention. What if your company had in your agreements that rude behavior might result in a ban from the company? What if you rewarded customers that called you for the first time after two years with a surprise discount? What if you decide to reward polite behavior? We are talking basic behaviorism theory here. It works with dogs, kids, students, employees, spouses, neighbors and even with fish. WHY SHOULD THIS NOT WORK WITH CUSTOMERS?

The result will be happier customers, happier employees with experience and in turn happier customer again. It is a positive cycle. How hard can it be?

Media is a bad customer service catapult

You might have seen TV shows where mistreated customers get help from experts to solve their problem with companies. These TV shows are contributing to the angry customers and works as a threat to companies, resulting in panic amongst the blind bats in top level management that want to avoid bad publicity in the first place. How do you deal with this? Today a lot of companies try to deal with the symptom and totally ignoring the cause. Some are being paid to silence, and this is the true expense of customer support. Make it easy for your customers to take their business elsewhere, even help them to find a new company to do business with. BECAUSE YOU MIGHT WANT SOME OF THEM TO COME BACK SOME DAY! If you pull them to court and make a lot of fuzz with a customer leaving you are only making sure that you will never ever do business with them again. And again, if you focus on your quiet and happy customer you might not end up in media in the first place and those willing to talk to media would have changed company a long time ago.

The silent crowd is gold

You might have hundreds maybe thousands of customers in your database that have not been in touch with your company for years. Are they being neglected? Are you automatically assuming that these are happy? They might be happy, but they might be on the break of being amazed, and you can be amazing. And what do amazed customers do? They brag and bring other customers to your company. Would you rather talk to these? Do you still believe that customers should be treated equal?

I hope you enjoy my blog and feel free to subscribe. Thank you so much for reading, you rock!

Motivational Gardener

One of the great benefits of blogging is that you get to connect with people you would never meet in real life. David Burkus of the LeaderLab is providing this blog with his second guest post. If you want to read more from David, check out his previous guest post Lost in Definition or visit his website at the LeaderLab  So for the second time around, I am proud to introduce David Burkus this time eating buffalo wings….

My Buffalo Wild Wings Rant

(or, on the folly of rewarding A while hoping for A).

“Do you guys have email addresses?” our waitress asked. It was Thursday, and I was partaking in 60-cent Boneless Wings Day. After delivering a sarcastic “No” I asked why she was asking. She wanted us to enroll in the Buffalo Circle Loyalty Program. No, she didn’t want us to…BWW did. Most restaurants have some variation on “offer a free $4 appetizer on your birthday in exchange for attacking you with spam” programs. Our waitress didn’t seem too interested in gaining our email so I asked, “What do you get out of it?”

“I get a ticket for each person enrolled, and every week we have a raffle. The winner gets out of clean up duty.”

Suddenly, I figured out why she wasn’t interested.

In a perfect world, employees would be perfectly matched to their job. Every manager would be a leader and leaders would inspire and engage their employees by reminding them how their job ties into a larger mission. But sometimes you just need wings delivered to table eight. Those jobs call for transactional leadership, a.k.a., incentives. It’s a standard rule of organizational psychology: that which gets measured gets done; rewarded gets done better (or more often). Expectancy theory tells us incentives work when task performance is easily related to the reward, and the reward is desired. But if you make the incentive too complex, or one no one cares about, the system falls apart.

You get waitresses who don’t care if I become a member of the hallowed Buffalo Circle.

So what should Buffalo Wild Wings do? Pay for performance: a dollar for each enrollee. Or force rank employees: everyone gets a percentage in tip share equal to their percentage of enrollees. There are many different incentive solutions that would simply tie performance to reward.

A raffle tickets is not one of them.

David Burkus
editor | LeaderLab
http://theleaderlab.org

Have you ever visited a friend and when you are about to leave he grabs hold of your feet and begs you to stay. He even offers you another free beer or cake, or promises to behave. He didn’t mean to be rude or ignorant. He would even give you money to stay a little longer. He won’t let go of you, hide your jacket and cling on to you as hard as he can. He follows you down the driveway begging you to stay.

I bet most of you have not experienced this. Most of you have probably received a hug, a thank you for your visit. Please do come again, I am looking forward to seeing you soon. If you have experienced a friend that won’t let go, did you want to come back? No? How do we part with friends and family? (Well the loved ones) Then why are most businesses acting like the first example?

Depart as friends

Binding contracts, following the rules, arguing about small amounts of money, refusing to give further service because the customer is leaving. All this is creating a negative impression confirming the customer’s beliefs that leaving was the right decision. How many of your old customers would like to return? How many are you losing for a lifetime? 

If a customer leaves, help them, find solutions for them and even try to recommend a preferable competitor whom might meet the customers’ demands. Thank them for doing business with you and wish them the best. Inform that they are welcome back at any time. Make sure that leaving you is such a pleasant experience that they are amazed. This is your last chance to give a good impression of your company. Make sure it is a good one. Who will your customer think about when their next business partner is messing up? What if you call them in about a year and they say we left because of… and you can reply with; “Yes we knew that was a problem; however we have fixed those issues now”. If you let your customer leave you as a friend, he might return as well. And that is the ultimate goals in farewells. Make sure you leave an impression that will help your customer to return.

Behold the future

Do you want customers that might return or customers who will never return? This is your choice. Your customers might need your services for a lifetime, if you cut the lifeline you might end up with moving your unhappy customer to your competition. If they hate you they will be happy with mediocre service from the competitor and never return to you even if you manage to change your customer service level to amazing. Because they have become locked in a principle: I will rather stay here eating shit from A then ever going back to B. Customers who are leaving you have been willing to do business with you. They might leave for a bunch of reasons. Make sure that they will leave with a positive experience in the end and they might come back.

The Evangelists

Amazing customer service might create evangelist that spread the good word about your company and draw new customers. But evangelists do not need to be happy as with so many things in life there is grades of passion. Hate is a feeling that can grow strong. If you can’t make happy evangelists, make sure not to make unhappy evangelists that will do whatever to bring you down. Today it is easy as well. Twitter, Facebook, blogging and other social media can spread news about your company fast. It is more important than ever to part with a smile and good wishes. – And welcome them back later on.

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