Customer Service Tools

Two Reasons Why Priority Numbers Demonstrate the Wrong Priority

2021-10-24T03:11:00.024+08:00

Let's forget the fact that you have already read the title of this post.....

What do banks, airlines, retail stores, vanity clinics, shipping, restaurants, pharmacies, schools, electric utilities, water utilities, cable companies, government offices, hospitals, and a long list of organizations added every year have in common?

Can you guess?

Many customer service managers swear its the greatest invention ever introduce in customer service.

Are we getting closer?

Here's another hint....

In spite of the fact they tell you it will get you served promptly and quickly it never does.

It comes in many forms, materials, and sizes.

It attracts almost everybody's attention except the person who is supposed to give you the attention.

Ok....let's get it over with.....

It's a priority number.

Banks use it....airlines use it.....retail stores have it....you get it....

Personally, I hate it. I have worked in customer service for almost twenty years. The use of priority numbers never came up as an alternative in improving customer service.

There are two and I have only these two reasons why I would not use priority numbers to improve any customer service response process or program.

Reason Number One
Priority numbers give your people a false sense that they have started the customer service process. Giving or offering customers a paper, cardboard, plastic or even a disc bearing a number gives frontline service people the feeling that they have already started serving customers.

My first example and usually a more common one is the experience I have with banks. Bank tellers give me the impression that tellering is a process that seems to have a universal intent of socially or psychologically disconnecting service staff from the essence of customers. They can't seem to look at you in the eyes or even give you a passing glance even when you are in front of them.

My first experience of holding a priority number myself was when I accompanied my mom to buy airplane tickets. After you get the number, frontline staff just totally ignore you.

Frontline personnel probably have this conversation in their heads that since we (the Customer) already have a number they can proceed to step two which says: "I'll get to you when it pleases me" or "I'll get to you after I get back from lunch". Since there's a likelihood of 9 out of 10 this service staff don't like people in general, this can be a really long wait for you (the Customer).

Just recently, I walked into a retail store that specializes in computer accessories (one of many big chains of similar kind). After stepping in I stayed right in front of one of the many service counters in a room of seven sales staff. I was the third customer with two already lining up on one of the counters.

The second customer (a lady) told me to get one of those recycled compact discs with a big number on it because they won't serve you unless you get a priority number. I guess the staff was very serious about the numbers because there were seven of them in the store. Nobody thought of just calling the second lady and serve her since she already has Number Two on her hand.

I called out to a guy in the other counter across the one I was lining up to and the response he shouted back was to get a priority number. I responded by just telling the guy that there's at least five of them doing nothing. Why can't they just ask me what I need and if they don't have it, then I can just leave. The guy still insist on me getting a number and then he turns his back to go back to what he was doing (which is nothing).

Maybe I am downright condescending or just totally dumb but I had a distinct feeling that these sales counter people were made to believe the following:

Customers generally cannot count beyond five.
Customers do not understand that numbers on disc are very important to customer service.
Customers do not care about recycling compact discs that is why they don't know what the priority number is for.
Customers have no idea that what comes after two is three and so on.
Customers are supposed to follow the sequence of numbers displayed and flashing on light-emitting diodes.
Customers can only be served by sales staff directly in front of them.

May be you can add some more to these theories and assumptions. I think some genius in these retail organizations just invented the best customer service process for dummies.

Reason Number Two
A priority number in the hand of a Customer is a contradiction in terms. Although the primary purpose is to prioritize (taken from the word "priority") service to Customers, the exact opposite is what Customers actually perceive, feel and experience on a regular basis.

When I enter an organization and see a number dispensing device, I actually don't feel that I will be served. The first feeling I will have is I will be staying on some bench or standing in some corner to wait indefinitely. This trend has not change for at least 30 years of my life.

I have waited on many benches from social security offices, hospitals, business permit counters, trade name registration, clinics, bus stations, and even in a pizza parlor.

Priority numbers are never reassuring. It only tells me one thing consistently----wait and bear it.

One incident about priority numbers that really push this concept to the "hilt" happened in a government-managed hospital. I never forgot this incident because it made headlines in a local daily newspaper.

A man bleeding walked in with a really long knife stuck in his back. Apparently and obviously (well I thought it was obvious to the nurse in the Emergency Section then) the man was stabbed from behind and the assailant probably did not have time to pull out the knife from the man's back.

The first thing the nurse did (of course) is to ask the man to get a priority number and fill up a form. Even today for some reason, I still can't get my head around the fact that for an organization dedicated to saving human lives, this extreme mutation of callousness can come in the form of a customer service process or patient care process (a fancy name).

I thought medical professionals have this hypocritical, hypocritical, or hypo-allergenic oath that they subscribe to. It's kind of hard to remember these terms when institutions don't really mean to follow anything written on them.

If you are even remotely considering doing this in your own store (or hospital), I suggest you walk into and line up (short of being stabbed from behind) inside the store of your nearest or worst competitor. It doesn't matter which. You just need a perspective. This perspective is called "shooting yourself in the foot".

If you still don't get it, I suggest not getting a gun. There's a fire ax nearby somewhere inside your own store....

........break glass....

......take axe...and then.....

....drop it on your foot.

If you're a bit hurt that I might be inadvertently referring to your enterprise I apologize ...really....now about the ax in your store....

I would like to sincerely help you with that ax.

Know What You Want From Advertising

2021-10-22T00:48:00.038+08:00

There's this prevailing myth that advertising sells. I personally would want to believe this. Imagine the cost you'll save if you don't have to go through all that recruitment, training, and paying wages to get people to sell.

For salespeople who earn solely on commissions, they would wish that advertising actually sells anything. Salespeople know that the launch of every new ad campaign is merely an opportunity to ride on a short burst of interest for their offering.

Selling door to door is as common today as it was 50 years ago.

If you take extra effort to look at books and sales training materials now and 50 years ago, you'll find out that the training outline hasn't changed much.

Even the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical and medical industry still rely mainly on door-to-door selling.

The amount of business cards and free sample products on a typical doctor's clinic is a clear demonstration of how pervasive is door-to-door selling in this industry.

Unless any form of advertising tool or device actually delivers a product and accepts payment, I suggest sticking to direct selling. Advertising outfits or agencies will make you believe that whatever they are doing is actually selling.

Very few people creating those ad campaigns in advertising actually do selling and very few still actually sell their services by advertising.

You may not believe this but most advertising agencies still use the old method of advertising: door-to-door selling.

Don't you think it's funny that a business creating advertising doesn't actually use advertising to sell their business?

I actually find it monumentally stupid that some businesses actually pay so much for a press conference to launch an advertising campaign that will "supposedly" sell a new product.

Most of these types of launching are really more appropriate for mass-produced consumer goods.

You see all these VIPs from the company together with advertising executives making speeches, making a toast, cheering, and congratulating themselves after "unveiling" a big screen that will give you a preview of the advertising campaign.

Advertising in mass-produced consumer items requires a consistent and ever-increasing amount of investment. Competition for customer attention is keen in these markets.

There is so much noise and clutter created by this keen competition that all the players in even the smallest industries cannot help but invest in advertising whether they believe it works or not.

Even when I was in advertising, I always believe that advertising impact should be measured in some way.

Unless your brand is as popular as tap water to the whole of humanity, you have to selfishly define what you need to accomplish with every advertising copy you approve for release. By the way, today even drinking water is sold under dozens of brands through advertising.

There are two (2) advertising media you have to watch out for: newspaper and radio advertisement. As a small enterprise, the cost of a TV ad maybe too way off your comfort zone.

In a newspaper ad, you will need a certain visual impact and readability.

Notice that I did not use visual appeal.

I use visual impact and readability.

You can use visual appeal on billboards but the same material may not be so appealing as a full-page ad on a newspaper because the whole paper only shows black, white, and grey.

You may argue that there is already color in some newspapers today. Yes there is color but it's going to cost you from 25% to 50% more per color. You have to ask yourself: Will the additional color with its accompanying cost guarantee a certain level of return on investment in terms of actual sales?

The timing of your newspaper ad is important.

You may have to do a little detective work on what days in a week your target audience actually read their paper. Of course, you have to know what local daily they actually buy or subscribe to.

You also have to decide if you are going to use newspaper ads on a regular basis.

Newspapers brag about their circulation in thousands per day. This figure actually indicates how many copies of their paper actually go out to both street buyers and subscribers.

Don't get impressed by their figures just yet. These figures may not have any impact on the kind of audience you want.

Let's assume the local daily has a circulation of 45,000 a day.

They quote 1200 bucks for advertising space for your advertising copy. They will make a sales pitch of translating this cost to about 3 cents per exposure.

They get this by dividing the cost of advertising space by the total daily circulation which is 1200 over 45,000.

I don't use this formula in measuring my cost.

I measure my advertising cost in real terms.

I usually get about three (3) ads in a week to not only get exposure but also to test the cost of the ad in real terms. This also works well if you already know how much it costs to acquire a new customer.

When I was marketing short courses for Microsoft Office and Network Administration, I measure results by actually documenting the calls made as a direct result of a newspaper ad.

I know that it takes about 75 bucks at least to get a new customer to sign up for a course. This cost includes salespeople's time, pamphlets, registration forms, and other things that eventually lead to a customer shelling out his cash for the course.

The local daily has a circulation of 15000 per day. We took an ad that cost us about 5,000 bucks but it advertised not just one course but the whole line of computer training brands.

It went out on a Sunday. From Monday to Saturday of the next week it recorded 680 calls in direct response to the ad.

The actual cost per inquiry from customers is 7 bucks and 35 cents!

Since only 32 actually signed up, my actual cost of generating new customers is 156 bucks and 25 cents.

Remember that my usual cost of acquiring new customers is 75 bucks. This tells me that it will cost me 100% more per new customer if I continue to use newspaper ads to acquire customers.

You must also view this cost from another perspective.

It is not the ad that actually made people sign up.

It's the person handling the phone inquiry trained specifically to close sales over the phone that made the sign-up for the courses possible.

If the objective of the ad is simply to create enough interest to make people call and make inquiries, the ad campaign was a great success.

It took only 7 bucks and 35 cents per inquiry. The profit margin for only 15 people signing up was 7500 bucks.

You can actually apply this formula to radio advertisements.

The difference between a radio ad and a newspaper ad is that you can test the audio copy of the ad before you broadcast it.

I usually define the following objectives for my newspaper and radio ads:

induce the reader or listener to call and inquire
register for the service or product advertised via phone
make reservations via phone
ask for the freebies (if the ad is promising freebies)
capture specific information about prospects or callers
walk into the store and present a cut-out coupon or gift certificate
log in to the website
leave name and email address on a registration web page
download a free e-book with a return link to our website

Go through the above list. I have not included selling as one of the objectives. Until recently most conventional advertising does not lend to selling of any kind.

As I said, until recently.

I'm Giving You a Free eBook: The Four Tasks To Do to Access & Use Your LinkedIn Connection Data

2021-10-21T10:54:00.001+08:00

I started out on LinkedIn in 2004, I was just curious then.

Didn’t have many expectations and it took me a couple of weeks in fact to complete my profile.

After I completed my profile, friends and colleagues started seeing me online. Even colleagues so far away from home now living in places like New Zealand, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, Middle East and even some parts of Africa I’m not so familiar with started getting in touch.

At that time the opportunity to write and to publish was through invitation. I suspected that anyone with an “All-Star” status was invited.

Quite exciting then.

From a network of fewer than 30 members limited only to people I personally know, my network grew.

Even then I was still selective in terms of accepting who should be in my network. Even though I did get a few consulting engagements through LinkedIn I still did not use it the way most do.

I largely tap LinkedIn as a source of learning and personal development. I specially choose people who can make me a better person, a better consultant, and a better advocate of development.

You will have your own reasons for being on LinkedIn.

You have to grow it before it can make sense to you or be useful to you.

I’m not going to speculate how useful it will be. My job in writing this e-book is to help you access your connection data and hopefully make you productive.

I hope it serves your purpose well.

Please subscribe to the eBook now to get access!

Download Now!

Wait for an email providing you a link to the eBook in portable digital format.

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Customer Service and LinkedIn

2021-06-04T03:51:00.001+08:00

Establishing customer or corporate public expectations through your professional profile is a sound approach if you are a CEO or a consultant communicating what you can do for your stakeholders.

The usual way of broadcasting your profile is either inserting it in your corporate profile, your business plan or do a mass mailer of your resume (which is bordering towards narcissism).

Or simply build a website that broadcast all the good stuff about yourself (which may also be considered narcissistic).

Your profile is really your resume.

Your resume is the comprehensive kit or advertising material you will need to put your best foot forward.

To do this you will have to provide substantial information about you that is relevant to the job you're applying for.

Don't do an information overload by cramming everything about you in your resume.

It must be simple to be beautiful and logically organized to make sense to your prospective reader.

We are all familiar with the importance of resumes when applying for a job. There are really more to resumes than just selling yourself during a job application.

You need to always remind yourself what you have become, what knowledge and skills you have acquired, and what you have achieved not only as a professional but as a person.

It is the reason why you have to update your resume at least once a year or preferably when a new year starts.

It can be a good morale booster if you're down and figuring out what will be the next step in your career or in your life.

Generally, when you draft your business plan and submit it to investors, banks, venture capitalists, etc., you will most likely be asked to back up your management profile with either your resume or the resume of your partners or managers.

It is just logical.

If you claim you can pull off what you were talking about in your business plan, the least you can show them is what knowledge, experience, and skills you have to be able to pull it off.

The resume will do just that.

If you are into a consulting business, you will need to advertise your experience, the projects you have handled, and the problems you have solved.

The resume will even be more significant once you have to create a short description of your background for a book you will be writing.

(Ever notice the short group of text that gives the background of the author just below the author's picture.)

Personally, the best thing that happened to me in terms of broadcasting my resume or professional profile is LinkedIn.

If you have not heard of LinkedIn yet, it is one of the largest business networks online to meet professionals, business leaders, and colleagues.

It is a channel for you to build relationships and find opportunities for yourself. I have been a member of LinkedIn since 2004.

I have kept in touch with former customers, colleagues, friends, classmates, and even former students in LinkedIn.

What is it you will see in LinkedIn? Let me give you a short preview.....

Home page is where I see updates happening within my network like friends or members getting new jobs or promotions, articles written or endorsed by members, professional endorsement from network members, people I may know that are not yet within my personal network, etc.

Your Profile page is basically a good preview of your professional profile or your "living resume".

It's a living resume because LinkedIn always prompts you to improve your resume or update it.

There's the My Network page where you see everybody that you have linked with (or you have Linked In) since you became a member. This is your professional network. This is like a directory of all the people you have related to within LinkedIn since you established yourself in the network.

The Jobs page is where corporate members post job openings in their respective companies. If you use LinkedIn primarily for career growth, this is the page you will look at very often. I seldom visit this page, but whenever I do it gives me a preview of the companies that are expanding based on the scope and quality of the job openings being advertised periodically.

The Messaging page is where you can communicate to members of your network. It works just like any other messaging service but only works with people within your network.

The Notification page is where you get updates from members of your network like articles they've written, news about their careers, and updates from LinkedIn (updates from you included).

It is on LinkedIn that I have re-established relationships with former colleagues and customers. These are the people I thought I will never get to meet again. I'm not really meeting them again but it is the next best thing because now we communicate regularly and even share a lot of things professionally. You get sound advice from them occasionally.

If you are a first-time user or visitor, the features in the network can be confusing or maybe a bit intimidating. The roster of members in LinkedIn is quite impressive and just being within their network beholds many possibilities and opportunities either as a marketer, customer, leader, mentor, or student.

I distinctly remembered not being able to write anything on my profile for several weeks after I registered. Today, it won't be that intimidating anymore to new users or visitors. There's now a manual available to help you or walk you through the process of being a member, preparing your online resume, and establishing your own network in LinkedIn.

The manual is entitled....

"Learn LinkedIn: How to Build your Living Resume"

The manual will teach you how to set yourself up on LinkedIn (if you are not a registered member yet!). Once you have set up yourself up on LinkedIn you can establish your account and start developing your own "living resume" in an easy step-by-step process. The manual will walk you through a lot of must-know tips and information to ensure you don't make mistakes. For old-time users like me, it will also recommend new tricks to enhance my living resume.

During my time, we did not have this manual, so I was actually adding, deleting, more adding, and more deleting of information in my resume. Even today, I'm still updating it and enhancing it to reflect things I have been doing and achieving through the years.

The manual will spare you the agony I have to go through updating my resume. It eliminates the trial and error of enhancing your professional profile like I did. Well, there's always room for improving your profile on LinkedIn.

Before I forget, here is the page where you can download the manual.....I hope it helps you like it did me...

Learn LinkedIn: How to Build your Living Resume

The 20 Customer Service Facts You Should Know

2021-05-25T20:16:00.001+08:00

In my more than ten years in the service business and information technology, I have come to accept 20 facts in my customer service world.

You may think otherwise about these facts, but I always get in trouble when I take for granted any one of them.

I also noticed that the more conscious I am about these facts, the better I manage my team, the more refined are the customer service trainings I designed, and the more proactive my approaches to customer service becomes.

One of the best bonuses I get is that I seldom get unresolved issues haunting me in the future.

Here are my 20 Customer Service Facts:

1. If you keep tabs on your resolution rates related to complaining Customers, you will find out that less than 10% of dissatisfied Customers will actually file a complaint or let you know about it.

This is one reason why I always make it a commandment in my sales or customer support teams to call the Customer 3 or 5 days after delivery or completion of service.

You should not wait for them to tell someone else about the problem before you have a chance to know about it.

Most problems really are just a result of a Customer not being educated enough to harness the benefits from your product or service.

Show them how!

Besides, if your service or product provides him or his company an edge, why would he tell his next-door neighbor why he has the edge.

He knows his competitor is going to get hold of it somehow, he just doesn't want it happening anytime soon.

2. 300% more people will know about your bad service from dissatisfied Customers than your good service from satisfied customers.

Salespeople have always observed this pattern about Customers.

If you are not that keen yet about this trend better watch out because you might end up hearing it from your competition after he gets your Customer.

Worst! He gets your biggest Customer.

This is one fact that is not funny when it's eating up your market.

You will lose Customers and it's usually too late to know why.

If your Customer is a member of an association or a club, you can bet that half of the members already know about the bad news.

You can also bet that nobody will hear a whisper about how you have dealt with the problem later on.

But that's a different story altogether.

3. Although Customers seldom make their complaints known, dissatisfied Customers will most likely find and meet Customers with the same experience.

They will talk more about the problem and will tend to attract more people who will listen.

This explains the previous fact.

Haven't you noticed that you tend to have more listeners with bad news than good ones?

The uglier it is, the more glued the audience will be.

You always find more headlines with ugly...No horrible news than happy ones when you watch TV.

You notice one other thing. You never turn the TV off!

You're glued!

4. If you can resolve an issue or fix a problem of a complaining Customer, 80% of this kind of Customers will come back and will most likely make a purchase again.

You will increase this percentage to 90% if you act immediately upon notice of the complaint.

Logic would have told us that if you mess up, you should get fired like a service provider or supplier.

You don't get fired. You get 8 out 10 of them coming back!

Why?

In a crisis or if some problem comes up, this is the only opportunity you have of showing a Customer that there is an organization, process and people behind your service or product.

This is assuming you indeed have an organization, process or people behind your service or product.

By solving the problem the Customer sees you at work.

They see procedures being followed.

They get calls.

They get interviewed about a problem.

And, they see real people, not machines doing something for them.

They see. They don't hear about it or get told about it.

They clearly see action in progress.

This action in progress allows your Customer to size you up.

Know what you can do. See your capabilities.

This is why I firmly believe that an opportunity to serve under these conditions should not be passed up.

5. No technology can be a substitute for human interaction.

Even if the technology is the only contact with Customers, certain needs will eventually require some form of human contact.

Human physiology will always seek out some form of affective human interaction.

Have you heard about the "crib syndrome" that afflicts only infants?

It's been suspected that this syndrome normally happens if the baby does not experience a nurturing environment or more specifically human touch.

As early as infancy, human physiology already exhibits the craving for human touch.

6. Treating Customers badly for any reason will eventually carry costs and consequences.

I don't believe in karma or all that esoteric beliefs.

I do believe in action and consequent reaction.

As early as high school, you've been introduced to this concept in Physics.

Human beings have a funny way of getting back at you.

Animals are more predictable because we already know how predictable or unpredictable they are.

Human beings are complex. Even if you understand their habits they don't behave exactly as expected in the same situation all the time.

When you hurt a Customer by not serving him or her well, you will be remembered.

It has nothing to do with selling principles or organization. It has to do with human nature. Pain has a way of making our memory sharper and our recall more instinctive.

The reckoning will come. It may not be now.

It will come!

More than 10 years of dealing with Customers made me a believer in this phenomenon of eventual reckoning.

7. Your reputation and credibility are directly proportional to the quality of your service and eventually to the quality of your Customer relations.

If you have good customer service, you tend to have more people talking and hearing about it. Quite naturally, you tend to have more customers. It is just consequential that you will have some kind of reputation. Hopefully, you have a great reputation rather than a bad one.

Find or better yet develop the right process and team to ensure that you nurture a good relationship with your customers. The stronger your relationship with customers, the more solid and enduring will be your reputation and credibility.

Your reputation is built on the relationship you keep. Who is more inclined to believe you than people or organizations who know you--Your Customers.

8. The environment in which you will establish good impressions with Customers on first contact will always be stacked against you.

Remember that the Customer is the person who sets the time, the date, the place, and the agenda of the visit (if you let him).

If the Customer tells you to see him in his office or place of work, he again controls the atmosphere and physical environment.

It is rare that the Customer will see you all excited about what you are about to say unless of course he initiates the call or asks for the appointment.

The necessity of creating the first impression is lesser if the Customer initiates the call or meeting.

The Customer has more or less a clear grasp of what he wants from the meeting. He expects you to validate his wants or needs.

Normally, if the customer initiates the call he would already have a certain level or scale of expectations. It's like already having 100 bonus points in his pocket for you. What you do or don't do during the meeting will just give him an incentive to keep the 100 bonus points for you or take out 5 points here, 10 points there until you got just about 50 bonus points to nothing.

If you're initiating the call, what you are really doing is grunt work. I don't care if you have undergone gazillions of sales training. If you are initiating the visit or call, everything is stacked up against you.

Good luck!

9. Sophisticated Customer service or retention programs fail simply because it lacks appreciation of the universal principle of good business and good manners.

Most support services for computer systems are failing in their service ratings not because their core services are bad it's because they lack the common sense to do the simple things.

Service call requests coming in by phone are not handled well.

Customers complain that they keep repeating themselves to people at the other end of the line.

Service personnel can not remember the details of their complaints.

Customers' repaired units are delivered with films of dust on their surface. Smudges of greasy fingerprints on clean surfaces.

Service personnel forgot to take their trash with them or fail to return the Customer's equipment in its proper place.

Common sense dictates that you treat Customers the way you expect others to treat your daughter, son, wife, or mother. Of course, you will find this far from any form of common sense if you are a wife-beater or child molester.

It's the reason why I always choose happy people with lots of high self-esteem after I pick them out for their common sense.

Happy people tend to have a better disposition and are easier to train. They tend to handle stress better especially those created by customer interaction.

10. In an existing Customer service program, you will lose your best employee especially those with sound judgment first, (followed by the team if he is a team leader) if you don't nurture the right working environment.

Good workers especially those with sound judgment and really competent ones know what is a healthy working environment for them and their team. These are the people who are not afraid to leave when they think things are not right for them, for their colleagues, and their customers.

These are the kind of people who can easily build a strong relationship with customers.

There's also one good thing about these types of employees. Team members tend to be loyal to them if they become team leaders or are team leaders. They will do almost anything for them. This is usually the reason why you tend to lose your best team members right after the team leader leaves.

Take care of your team.

Create the best working environment for them especially after the launch of a successful campaign (any campaign!).

Rewards must be tailored to what motivates your team.

Remember this: Money may be the best reason for taking on a job but it is seldom the first or significant reason for leaving one.

Team leaders (the Good Ones!) who conduct their own exit interviews of team members who leave will seldom hear money as the reason for leaving a job. If your team member refuses an exit interview with you, you are probably the reason for leaving the company or the team.

11. The people who should be convinced about your value proposition and your Customer service program should be the very people who will deliver the proposition and manage the program in the first place.

If the frontline staff themselves do not believe or have little faith in the company's customer service program, you cannot expect them to deliver the quality of service expected by customers.

On a staff-to-customer level, the customer service staff will have little empathy and will generally have little motivation to go the "extra" mile to help customers.

Frontline staff who do not believe in the very service they deliver will have no motivation to give the company feedback and in most instances will generally "conceal" the actual conditions prevailing in the field.

You must have a credible customer service program. The kind that make sense to your own people.

12. The sincerity of any Customer service program is directly proportional to the cohesiveness and effectiveness of the support teams involved in its management.

A company that is confident in the capability of its service team don't worry so much about their service contracts. Service teams that deliver according to customer standards seldom get the opportunity to handle customer complaints because problems never get out of hand too often to become a customer's problem.

You must invest time, training, tools, and other resources to make your team cohesive and effective.

If you have an honest-to-goodness customer service program you will spend more time making your customer support teams more effective rather than tinkering around with the waiver" or "non-liability" clause of your service contracts.

I have seen so many service contracts in my career from really good to really "plain paper useless". There are contracts that have so many waivers and clauses to pre-empt damage suits that it practically ties the hands of service personnel even if they sincerely want to help customers.

And let me add that the sincerity of any Customer Service program is also directly proportional to the distance of the CEOs office to the company's legal counsel. You really and truly are sincere if you see your lawyer less and less about customer issues.

Companies with dismal customer service performance have lawyers busy either suing customers for unpaid bills or are defending themselves against consumer rights litigation or non-performance liabilities.

13. A problem or Customer complaint is an opportunity to do better and to reinforce your Customer service policy and program.

Nothing can subject a customer service program to the most rigid acid test but a live customer making a legitimate complaint.

A good service program kicks in almost automatically upon the first contact with a complaining customer. Information about the complaint is immediately gathered while the customer's profile and details of the related purchase is reviewed. An account manager is immediately informed and made accessible to the customer.

The whole chain of events from the first receipt of the customer contact will show the customer real people acting on the complaint. The customer will be able to discern from the flurry of activities that a system is in place to assist him. Support people return calls to customers and provide feedback on the steps taken to resolve the issue.

14. A review of actions to respond to complaints from dissatisfied Customers will provide an opportunity to look into your company's internal process related to Customer Service or service delivery.

This is supposed to be a very obvious conclusion but surprisingly most of the processes to support customer complaints were not really designed to resolve issues. More often the process is really a complex procedure to either evade responding or discourage Customers from lodging their complaints or raising issues.

A bad process even if reviewed a hundred times is still a bad process. No amount of review will change the outcome of a bad process. Ever heard of "garbage in, garbage out"?

Good service providers know that the key to delivering good service every time is the quality of the core service, the process, the tools, and the team.

When a unique incident, issue, or problem comes up to test your process, a review must immediately be conducted to find out how the process responded. Did each of the components seamlessly work from one sub-process to another? Is there a bottleneck or glitch somewhere? What conditions led to the glitch?

This is supposed to be really common sense unfortunately this "review" is not really that common.

Now we hear about quality control circles, process improvement, ISO that basically starts their methods with a review of the process. Today they call it fancy names like quality assessment, quality audit, system assessment, system audit, process assessment, and all that high-sounding terms which are really designed more to make consultant's work appear complex and their costly bills easier to swallow.

15. The finer is your definition of market niche the more focused your Customer service will be.

This may not come from common sense, but marketers should already realize that the more clearly you understand your customer, the more specialized you tend to design your services around their needs. This will eventually lead to a more defined set of distinct services for just a specific need.

A good example of this is the way Internet service providers have evolved. Before, there was really no distinction between a person using Internet services in the office and those using the Internet at home. Now, you have corporate accounts, the home market, and even mobile users.

Service providers, at least the most dynamic ones, are learning that they can no longer offer a smorgasbord of services and attach a single price tag for all types of customers. Customers now truly perceive a value relevant to their unique situation and buy in only from providers who can understand this perceived value.

Service providers, fortunately for customers, are no longer having a "me-too" pricing strategy. They know that those who get the price pegged right the first time dominate a niche almost rapidly especially in a service that is technology-driven.

Marketers are now fine-tuning their ability to define their niche not from a concept of who is a customer but from data taken from a customer base that they now own. This enables marketers to develop products and services that are more focused.

16. The more complex is your offering the broader will be the scope of your Customer service programs.

Some customer service programs are actually born out of a service concept catering to a broader customer profile. In essence, the definition of the service is a consequence of an assumption that the customer has multi-level and multi-faceted needs. The result is a process that accommodates so many contingencies.

The customer service program is not really one homogeneous program but a complex combination of sub-programs intended to respond to different customer needs.

This condition is not inherently bad. The real issue is capital expenditure and logistical requirements. An organization that has an abundance of knowledge resources and other resources will not find customer service a real challenge even if it has a complex offering.

The challenge is how to cover a broad spectrum of customer needs without wearing yourself too thin.

17. Between a prospect and a Customer, a Customer can do more damage to you by simply not doing anything.

In terms of value, a prospect has zero Customer Value. He is not a Customer, he is still a prospect. You have already invested in a Customer, that investment will go to waste if the Customer stops interacting.

I had a Customer covered by a maintenance contract for their mainframe computer. When he came across a problem related to our service, he simply allowed the contract to lapse.

This provided an opening for a competing service provider to offer an alternative.

He got our proposal for renewal and just sat on it for more than 30 days.

See, the Customer simply did nothing and I still lost the account.

18. The foundation and institutionalization of a good Customer service program hinge on the creation of a seamless process and the systematic documentation of each key component to ensure consistent delivery and maintenance of quality standards.

If you are having problems keeping your customer service up, you are most likely having the following:

Customers can't understand the terms and conditions of delivery.

Your own people can't seem to understand the terms and conditions of delivery.

Service personnel doesn't seem to follow the same method of initiating service delivery and can't seem to improve their resolution rate or response time.

You keep losing people at a time when they are supposed to be competent enough and can't seem to get the same level and quality of productivity from their replacement.

You are responding to the same form or nature of the complaint at an ever-increasing frequency and still, have your service people getting the response wrong every time.

You can't seem to get your competence training up and running at a level that does not demand too much time from your most senior and experienced team leaders and members.

You don't have the right people for the job.

You're delivering the wrong service to your customer because what you are delivering is not what your customer expects.

Most of these common and irritating issues I have solved by adapting only two (2) key strategies: the creation of a seamless process and systematic documentation.

The identification and creation of tools plus the design and development of truly effective skills training will evolve from these two (2) strategies.

19. Two (2) key roles must be present to perpetuate a seamless process:

The leader will be responsible for the process, and the key person or persons responsible for the results.

The definition, selection, and installation of the right leader for a good team will ensure the integrity of the customer service process. A competent and effective team will ensure that service standards are achieved.

Each member of a team in a process is responsible only for the result of a component of the process assigned to him. The team leader must be responsible for the process end-to-end because he is the one with a broader or overall perspective of the customer service process.

20. When all things are equal and perfect, meaning product, service, process, organizational structure, technology, and communications, your weakest link will be two kinds of people:

The leader is responsible for the integrity of the process; and, the team is responsible for the quality of the results.

The weakest link in any system or process is the human component. This part of the system or process is the less predictable aspect of managing a system or process. People as part of the system are simply the most volatile and also the most dynamic.

The contingencies designed for any system will almost always address the doing or undoing of human nature or its consequence. The only time human nature is less a consideration in contingencies is when the effects of the environment or extreme outcome of natural calamities are factored in.

From the customer service perspective, we focus our attention only on the leader and the team.

It is important that you build a good team and manage it well.

Stick to basics. Choose your team leader well and help him build his team.

Dimension Six: The Team

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You now have a good service or product concept.

The delivery of this service or product is clearly defined and understood by everyone.

You have the right tools to ensure that the service or product is easy to deliver and will be done right all the time.

In spite of competition, you know you have to do it better and in the process make a profit by managing your customer service well.

You have the cash and capital in the right proportion but you cannot do this alone.

If this isn't a business, you will just probably be worrying about punching in and hope nothing messy is going to happen before the day ends.

Unfortunately, this is not a job and you are not a rank-and-file.

The business is going to be managed. It's you or someone else.

You need to deliver your customer service, systems are in place and tools will be use, the whole thing is going to be done over and over, you simply cannot do this alone.

You need a group of people who know what they are doing.

This group will do it because they understand their role in the whole process of customer service.

They are trained to deliver and support customer service.

In all likelihood, they will define the quality standards of delivery, set up the system to support your process, ensure continuity and consistency by documenting your customer service process, and develop the training program for your future staff.

You need a dynamic team!

Why Build a Team
Society is increasing pressure from organizations not only for increased profitability and productivity but also the expectation that organizations must also improve the quality of life.

Business enterprises want profitability; government aims to effectively deliver services; while not-for-profit organizations try to alleviate social or economic inequity including the effective management of the environment.

Whatever the aims the incentive to use human resources as little and as much in the most effective and productive way is great.

Today, the use of teams is gaining ground to answer these aims.

Whether in corporations, in special police teams, in the armed forces or in foundations, the use of teams to deliver cost-effective completion of projects and the assignment of project managers as team leaders will continue to be a primary alternative for project management.

Let's start building your team!

Good Teams
It is not a team if it is not a good team.

So what are the traits of a good team?

Here are the most prominent traits of really good or effective teams:

Team members tend to work more effectively together than they would if they were working individually or alone.

A clear sense of itself as a special group but still has the capacity to interact positively with other groups in the organization.

Communicate clearly with one another and effectively across the organization.

Cultivates and negotiates positive assumptions and beliefs among team members.

Just because you have a list of what constitutes a good team, you may think that you can simply go around your organization and pick out a group as a team.

You build teams. You don't stumble into them.

Some actually believe that they can handpick people, designate a leader and give the group a name like Team A to come up with their team.

Like anything else, doing something you know nothing about is worse than doing nothing. Take a surgeon's advice: First, do no harm!

The Team Leader
The team leader can make or break a team just as a team can make or break a project. The challenge to management is electing the best man to fit the shoes of a team leader.

You just can't set any criteria that you like or your comfortable with when defining who will be best suited for the role.

Take time to know and understand a team leader's role in team building and management. The following broad roles should give you a hint:

making and keeping the goals clear

defining or setting measurable performance

managing relationships within and without

identifying or creating opportunities for team members

building confidence, strengthening commitment, and developing skills

If you want a list of more specific tasks a team leader does, here are some:

facilitating and preparing project plans

monitoring the progress of team projects

preparing reports of team progress

managing flow of information across the organizational hierarchy

facilitating and acting on behalf of the team to get support and resources from stakeholders

keeping track and documenting changes in project specs or team process

developing learning systems within the team

Sorry if I'm taking up team management in lesser detail here. This e-book is not for supervisors or team leaders.

The content in this e-book is for the business owners or management executives responsible for managing or developing marketing or customer service programs.

The Members
When choosing the composition of the team or making a selection of members, I prefer basing the selection on the knowledge and skills that each will bring into the team.

A certain degree of expertise or knowledge can help a lot if the team is tasked to undertake a specific function or role whether organizational or project-based.

In a team, one or more may have to possess problem-solving skills and make decisions.

If you work with projects long enough you will realize that most of your team members will acquire a certain level of problem-solving skills as they gain experience.

Of course, it will be a distinct advantage if one of the members have both problem-solving and decision-making skills at the formative stage of team creation.

Members of the team must be able to communicate with each other clearly because communication is the key to making diverse backgrounds work together.

To be able to know what skills are required for the job, you must be able to define the team's objective and the functions that will eventually define its structure.

Define Team Roles Clearly
Knowing your role in projects is almost obvious. In reality, very few things done in projects are the way they are because of being obvious.

Defining roles in projects is important but unfortunately, this is one of the most basic things that a neophyte in projects will almost certainly take for granted.

Defining roles as clearly as possible at the start of the project will save you time and most of all credibility.

Roles must be defined right after selecting and creating the team.

Problems brought about by poor or absence of clear team roles include bad coordination, assignment of the wrong skills to a task, extended deadlines or plain failure to complete deliverables.

What I'm trying to say is you cannot wait for the team members to define their roles or let them evolve.

The function of the team is dependent on the very specific objectives or clearly defined tasks set by the organization.

Management or the team manager must not let the team decide its function or its purpose.

Teams cannot draw guidance from organizational culture. To do so will leave the team lost and can lead to very serious organizational problems.

The most common team function that people see are the type like those actively operating in the manufacturing (or production) and service sectors.

Examples of this type are assembly line teams responsible for a component, software support teams, aircraft maintenance, security teams, or even building maintenance.

Most of the work for these teams is routine or prescribed by a regular flow of activities or tasks. Because of the nature of the work, almost all are full-time workers.

It may not be strange to find out that most of the members of this type of team have worked together for many years.

Since the profile of the work does not change drastically, this form of team function allows team members to manage and to organize their own work.

Another team function is the kind that is entirely task-focused.

This type of function requires that every member has a specific skill that contributes to the successful completion of the task.

The specific role or task defines the composition of the team based on the skills or knowledge that will be brought in by that prospective member.

The level of experience of each member in a particular field of specialization allows the team to modify solutions or improvise methods to get the job done even in the most extreme situations.

As a member of management or as a team manager responsible for the team with this kind of function, you will have to prescribe the mission or the specific task.

Once the team has been presented with their mission or task, they take over.

Team functions that are project or development-driven also require specialized knowledge or skills but the project takes longer to complete.

Members of the team may sometimes come together just to complete a single task or sub-project and later go back to their regular work.

Teams with this function tend to work with a high level of autonomy in the organization within the duration of the project.

Another team function that through the years has influenced the corporate world are those providing advice or assuming a certain level of decision-making in the organization.

Management teams that are common in the service or hotel industry are a good example of this team function. Highly specialized roles of investment or financial consulting teams are also examples of this function.

Not all functions require high-level participation. Quality control circles in many manufacturing organizations prescribe this function in their teams.

Members of the team with this function perform other roles in the organization and will normally use a very small portion of their working time.

The level of autonomy in this type of function is not very high and highly dependent on the degree of commitment that management has demonstrated to support the team approach in their organizational development.

The function of the team will greatly be influenced by how very detailed or specific is the objective or how generalist or broad are the goals.

Team Structure
If the processes that define the functions are very distinct you will have to find out if it will require a single person to accomplish or a single person with multiple roles and skills.

You will have to know if:

the process is happening simultaneously or executed in parallel work schedule;

the tasks or jobs are co-located or have to be performed in the same location or site;

the knowledge and skillset required to perform a job or complete a task can logically be expected from the same person or is it too highly specialized and unrelated to or not complementary to each other.

With the above knowledge, the team can map out the best approach to accomplish their goals or keep up with their vision.

Never assume that team members understand the structure the first time you discuss it with them.

Experienced have taught me to explain structure with a chart and a printout of the brief description of the roles represented by the neat boxes in the chart.

There's very little ambiguity with charts and those with a different perception of their roles will be able to ask the relevant questions when they read a brief description of their roles in hard copy.

Training Your Team
Training a customer service team is different from training an individual to equip him with competence.

The kind of training that a customer service team undergoes is not the kind that makes them more competent.

Usually, a well-selected team leader and members are more than competent taken individually.

The training that teams go through is designed more to make the team work or function together.

It is really training that forces or coaches team members to use knowledge and skills in complementary proportions so as to attain the synergy needed to successfully complete a project.

The experience undergone during training helps meld the team into a seamless working unit more capable than each member undertaking tasks individually.

Team Empowerment
You now have selected your team leader and members with a high degree of confidence that they will be competent enough to contribute to the team.

Training will also ensure that the team functions well together.

The team has a clear mandate, a structure, and a process developed by the team itself.

Your team manager and team leader are able to work harmoniously to get the right resources in the hands of the team at the right moment.

Even with all of the above the team still needs to take responsibility for their work. This is only possible if management delegates a vital process that will allow the team to complete their mandate.

Most organizations however are still toddlers when it comes to delegation. They do come up with some forms of delegation but with a twist.

They come up with a checklist and a detailed procedure for how the task will be done.

The team or workgroup has little legroom to innovate or to be creative when the situation requires.

What is missing is "empowerment"!

The team must be able to not only take responsibility for doing the relevant work to accomplish its mandate.

It must also be able to make the necessary or relevant decisions to carry out the work effectively. This is the core of real empowerment.

Empowerment has more to do with the culture of the organization and philosophy of management.

Unless the organizational culture allows real delegation and a truly honest belief that well-motivated teams can make the right decisions and act on those decisions, empowerment will not be possible.

I believe that it is simply difficult or impossible to make teamwork possible without real empowerment.

Only empowered teams can make significant gains in organizations.

People who do the actual work must have the power to make decisions about matters that get the job done.

Are you comfortable with team empowerment?

Teamwork
Our common visualization of the concept of teamwork is a team being able to work together to accomplish a goal.

Teamwork is a concept more delicate and less simplistic than that.

The heart of teamwork is delegation and empowerment.

Teamwork is getting teams to take responsibility for their tasks and jobs to complete their mandate without always consulting or running to top management.

You must give your team the authority to make specific day-to-day decisions related to operations or projects.

This can be quite a difficult proposition for managers who are control freaks.

Traditional managers have a different concept of management control. This concept can be in direct conflict with their understanding of delegation.

For some, delegation can be perceived as a threat to job security. Empowerment is a higher form of delegation.

Imagine how threatening empowerment can be to these traditional managers.

I believe that people who are responsible and are treated as responsible individuals will simply act their part and behave responsibly.

My experience working with students, old people, farmers, fishermen, gold miners, security forces, and even ex-convicts have made me realize that our ability to communicate our respect for people has consistently proven my belief.

Remember that not one aspect of team building will help you create an effective team. Teamwork is really just one of many.

If you want teamwork to happen I suggest not doing the following:

Making assumptions that members in the "team" are actually eager to work and that they are equipped with the necessary skills to work within the team.

Extending or imposing too much authority or too little of it.

Disregarding existing organizational structures to accommodate the creation of teams.

Providing inadequate organizational support.

Managing an operational team as a set of individuals.

Overall the success of teams will depend largely on three major factors: Commitment, Accountability, and Opportunity.

This is the last of the Customer Service dimensions. I do hope you learn something from it.

Do ask me questions?

Post it here of course!

Log on next time because I'll share with you some of the things I believe are facts of life in Customer Service.

Dimension Five: The Business Plan

2021-05-14T11:17:00.001+08:00

When I facilitate business planning workshops, I am amazed by how much marketing or business development people don't know about their customers.

Worse is that you don't come across good documentation of customer profiles.

Most of the customer profiles I come across describe their customers in so vague and generic terms they might as well describe a horse or any specimen of mammals considered our direct evolutionary cousins.

The really successful marketing organizations see customer information as a strategic tool, accumulate it like it was oil, and guard it like it was gold.

You may say that nobody can possibly have that much information about a customer.

If you're saying that then you're one of the many who don't keep information about your customer.

Customer Data is the Key to Intimately Know Your Customer

You may not know it but you probably are accumulating a considerable amount of data about your customers.

Most businesses or organizations keep data about customers, suppliers, or even competitors.

You can say you almost do this at a fairly regular rate.

You just do so without conscious or deliberate effort to use this data to your advantage.

What most businesses don't realize is that there is really a profile hidden in the cluttered paperwork that most sales and accounting people keep.

It's practically staring back at them like a large puzzle waiting to be pieced together.

Most of the information we get about customers is either an effort to look back or to understand what is about to come to either correct an oversight or avoid past mistakes.

Unfortunately, the objective of most business planning is like that, correct an oversight or avoid past mistakes.

It's going to be a long way before small businesses will take business planning or identifying customers as a proactive strategy rather than a remedial reaction to competition or the environment.

The typical questions you should be able to answer with your existing business information are as follows:

How much profit contribution value do you attribute to each customer in a year or a lifetime based on historical revenue and profit margin contribution?

Make a list of your customer constituting 80% of your revenue and net profits. Rank them according to net profitability.

Do you have a compelling reason why you should retain the account that is the most expensive to serve?

If you don't have the numbers from last year in a spreadsheet, you are going to need a crystal ball guessing the baseline projection.

There is really no empirical basis for you to guess what will be the starting point of the forecast.

You must be able to at least approximate the money value of each account from last year.

These are concerns better discussed during a business planning workshop or conference.

I know what you're thinking.

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT)

You're thinking that you are already doing SWOT every year. SWOT actually refers to Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

I don't know if you notice this yet, SWOT is not "the" business plan.

So much of the inputs in SWOT analysis are really a collection of perceptions from stakeholders.

The end result of the SWOT exercise is made even more confusing because sometimes facilitators with not enough business sense mistake the exercise of SWOT analysis as the planning itself.

This is the reason why stakeholders, after all the cost and time spent doing a SWOT analysis, come to realize that they have not moved forward to a new milestone in their planning process.

SWOT is what I refer to in my business planning workshop as the Pre-planning Information Gathering Phase.

Your customer profile is just one of many categories of information you should be getting during SWOT analysis.

This means that if you have completed your SWOT and proceeded immediately to business planning without a clear customer profile, you just undertook an expensive exercise in stupidity.

I am shocked organizations that used to do SWOT come to the workshops bringing nothing.

In my workshops, I give each of the stakeholders who will be attending the SWOT analysis a diagnostic questionnaire and a checklist of data or information they should take with them during the SWOT sessions.

Without these data or hard facts, the whole SWOT session will be merely a gathering of perceptions.

I may be moving too far from the subject but the bottom line is if you have a gathering of perceptions without the facts to validate them, your people's perception is really just that--perception.

When you do business planning, hard facts speak definitely and distinctly louder than perceptions.

You can act on facts better than you can on perceptions.

The only perception relevant to the planning process is your customers' perception of you and your offering.

Critical Aspect of Business Planning

The major aspects of business that must be factored in during a business planning workshop are as follows:

Goal Definition
Some organizations have very simple goals: separate the customer from his money and use every resource to make the money go their way.

The majority who don't really know who are their customers or why these customers even buy anything from them seem to have a simpler goal: Grab it and go!

For a very few they believe that serving the customer first is their goal.

These very few believe that somehow money will go to them more predictably this way.

The more experienced and savvy define their goal based on a certain customer base and revenue.

They set it this way because they believe that a certain volume of satisfied customers has an equivalent potential in terms of present and future revenue.

Goals can be purely financial, partly altruistic but definitely formulated to reach a certain completion within a time frame.

Strategy
The general approach of organizations or enterprises to achieving goals is its strategy.

Strategy is a simple statement that defines what has to be done and how it is going to be done.

It is simple enough to provide everyone a direction and general enough to accommodate several tactical or operational maneuvers in the medium and long-term to achieve goals.

Structure
It is surprising that very few realize that structure follows strategy.

Usually, when you start an organization, you start with the structure and then work down on the functions of the people who will be in the structure.

We do this even before we know what exactly the different units in the structure will do in relation to business goals.

Organization is the creation of the necessary structure and processes to support your strategy.

Policy
A broad set of guidelines for action or basis for a decision. In a strict corporate sense, it is the guidelines set by or approved by the board.

Policies may be prepared by one person or by a group, but they will have to pass the scrutiny and nod of another level of authority in a corporation.

Usually, this authority rests on the board of directors.

When somebody refers to an issue as a policy issue, it normally means it is a matter better left for the board of directors.

Procedure
Procedures are specific steps to complete a task or a routine. This brings the detailed and actionable reflection of policy at the operational level.

If your procedures are on paper that will normally constitute what you will refer to as SOP or standard operating procedure.

If it is in one compiled document, you can refer to it as your operating manual.

Financial Controls
The concept of financial management to most accounting department heads is not to allocate anything to anyone as much as possible.

In most small businesses, the accounting department will most likely be managed by a relative or even a wife.

This is typical of business without a plan.

Without a good business plan, cost management is really just cutting corners or not spending at all.

You must view cost management as a strategic tool.

The budget is the foundation of your financial controls.

Take time to study carefully what goes into the budget.

Getting the different business units involved will help a lot in preparing a realistic and sound budget.

You define goals and then formulate the structure that best enables you to harness resources to accomplish the goal.

You identify the resources you need and you pay for these resources with the confidence that each resource yields a certain level of profitability or helps you reach a certain milestone in your plan.

Get educated in financial management in general and financial controls in particular.

What you must decide on your own is to define what constitutes investment and operating costs.

Business Alliances/Commitments
Alliances provide advantages not possible if you are doing it on your own. Some resources like experience, technology, goodwill, and a host of others take some years to build.

Business alliances make for acquiring these resources in the shortest possible time.

An organization must however know their organization well in order to be convincing to a prospective business partner what relevant advantage he is bringing to the table.

Advantages of selective or strategic alliances:

Access to technology or patents

Infusion of knowledge and skills

Adoption of better management approach and systems

Goodwill

Access to a new or wider market

Access to better products or services

Adoption of cost-effective marketing strategy or system

Better service standards

You can probably add to this list your own unique experiences based on cooperative ventures you have created in the course of your own growth.

Your business plan must take into consideration the advantages and limitations of your existing business alliances.

Small enterprises may not have the cash flow to hire professionals to help them conduct business planning.

Most of the materials for business planning workshops have copyrights and consultants charge certain fees for the use of these materials.

Dimension Four: The Tools

2021-05-07T11:00:00.001+08:00

Implementing customer service programs require resources or tools.

Tools are specifically applicable arsenal at your disposal to act and to achieve results.

The modern age equips you with so many tools depending on the seriousness or commitment your organization has to customer service.

Tools must have a specific purpose and application.

Since the use of tools may mean investment or cost, it must be used effectively and for the right reasons.

Purpose of Tools

The concept of tools is as unique as the people or organizations using these tools.

What can be a simple checklist to one can be a quality control tool to another?

Customer service does need tools. Tools are used for the following varied purposes.

Here are some of the most significant ones:

aid in implementing and documenting feedback mechanism

help manage the business and know how the business is going

maintain the integrity of the process

maintain the quality of service delivery

help deliver and confirm delivery of service

aid in managing and developing the service team

make customer interaction less stressful for both service people and customer

secure and validate information and transactions

communicate to customers, to partners, to shareholders, company officers, and even the general public

If you are not yet sure if you are actually acquainted with the tools I'm talking about, here's a shortlist of some of them.

Communication Tools

Phone

Internet/Website

Mobile phones

Postal Mail

Advertising

PABX

Product/Service Delivery Tools

Technical Tools

Service Vehicles

Website

Postal Mail

Monitoring/Feedback Forms

Service Checklist

Administrative/Management Tools

Business Plan

Budget

Financial Statements

Manual of Procedures

Manual of Operations

Standard Operating Procedures

Service Agreement

HRD/Training Development Tools

Job Description

Skills/Knowledge Inventory

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Training Needs Analysis Questionnaire

Recruitment and Selection Manual

Customer Relations Tools

CRM Software

Customer Database

Process Flow Charts

Monitoring/Feedback Forms

Incident Reports

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Although there are almost unlimited sources of tools in the market the choice really will be based on your own realities and what you define as the most cost-effective for you.

There's a catch! You need to learn how to use them!

The Most Widely Used Low-Cost Tools Today!

Let us take the most effective and the most applicable to most small enterprises.

Survey FormsIf you do a poll of outlets in a mall, more than half of outlets don't have a survey form to deliberately capture data or information about their walk-in customers.

With printing and printers getting cheaper, businesses still don't take data mining seriously.

After all that hype through the years of customers being important, few businesses actually have the willingness or common sense to classify customer data in the same category as their account receivables.

The really strange thing in marketing is that the most successful businesses seem to be the ones with the system, tools, people, culture, and attitude to make customer profiling work for them.

Survey forms don't have to be long.

A survey form half the size of an A4 paper can get enough information if you know exactly what you want the data for.

Customer Data/Info Capture forms/DatabasesWill you recognize a database if you saw one?

Chances are if your accounting section or accountant is using a spreadsheet, you will probably have a set of databases somewhere on your PC.

Your sales summary in Microsoft Excel is a database.

Your mailing list is a database.

Your accounts receivable if organized in a spreadsheet is a database.

The key is to understand the logic behind the way the data in the database is organized.

I can go on and on about how databases can be used for a lot of things but that will mean writing a whole section altogether.

I'm writing a separate e-book on using databases in support of customer service. You can check that out.

You'll get a preview of that e-book from my website. Chances are I'll package it in portable digital format or PDF. The good news is the first edition will be free!

So keep logging on or simply subscribe to my newsletter.

Standard Business Forms (sales, accounting, service)

Let's run through several most common bunches of paperwork you take for granted that says so much about your customers.

Let's take your garden variety delivery receipt.

What do you normally get from your delivery receipt?

Most of the delivery receipts are actually standard forms created by your printer rather than by your people.

This means the data you get from them are mostly very common.

A typical delivery receipt form allows you to get the following data: delivery receipt serial number, date of delivery, name of the customer (probably with address and contact information), description of whatever is being delivered (it might include details about warranty), value of the goods, payment or sales document reference, name of person or office suppose to receive the item described, the person preparing the form and the person who actually delivered the items.

Now let's take your common official receipt.

Your common official receipt has the following data: official receipt serial number, date of transaction, mode of payment, name of paying customer (You sometimes don't bother getting contact information anymore and worst is you only get a big letter "C".), amount actually paid, description of the item bought, name of the person receiving the amount and maybe some notes about order slip or warranty.

How could very common forms like these generate a profile of customers?

The forms themselves will not reveal anything yet.

The data in those forms however will reveal a lot about the specific transaction in the form and eventually about the customers involved in the transaction.

The data themselves will not be of any use unless organized in a structured form.

This data in structured form is what we normally refer to as a database.

Office Productivity Software

In my eleven years working and talking about technology, I still see and witness the most incredible applications of information technology.

My amazement is not on the new things that are being introduced in the market but by the boundless possibilities users find in the technology.

Take for example our common, garden variety Microsoft Word.

If you ask the more experienced user why they want the new version, they would say along the lines of: "It's got five thousand more features than the last version."

If you ask exactly what features they are referring to, they would say along the lines of: "I'm not sure. I have not tried any of it yet!"

My affair with Microsoft Word is around the lines of no more than five hundred features in the last five years and probably less than that for Microsoft Excel.

This number is less than five percent of the features you will see described in a manual.

With that number alone, I had created and managed sales campaigns, mail campaigns, fax campaigns, product launching, and more than five thousand templates of letters responding to complaints from Customers.

Believe me, I did not get this through training, but through sheer nerve-wracking necessity and continuous crisis management of marketing campaigns for the last five years or more.

A cursory exploration in Microsoft Excel would have indicated that listing names and addresses would be simpler in spreadsheets than in word processors.

Not only that, you can actually have a cost-efficient scheduling and mail delivery system if you organize by district, city, block, or street the list created by your assistant.

You'll have a good mailing list to boot for the courier service to use to have recipients sign the actual receipt of the mail.

Somehow I have managed to accomplish the following using simple office productivity software:

Organize information about Customers.

Plan and implement effective marketing or sales campaigns.

Design inexpensive advertising copy for products.

Analyze revenue, net profit, and costs to help start a business plan.

Use simple software to manage time and projects.

Establish simple credit and collection schedule.

You will most likely have a PC in your office or at home.

The least you can do for your business is learn how to use it creatively and to the hilt!

Email/Autoresponders

E-mail marketing is one of the most effective business tools in the Internet today.

Although the leverage you get from this marketing tool is great, it is currently deluge by the notoriety of Spammers.

Autoresponders are simply automated systems that send email messages triggered by you or by someone sending an email message to your autoresponder account.

It is an automatic follow-up system you can use to respond to someone requesting information through a form on your website.

Autoresponders can be programmed to send instant or preset messages at specific timed intervals.

You can send your messages any time 24 x 7 to anyone emailing to your autoresponder account.

I have used autoresponders for several applications.

Currently, I'm using autoresponders for:

Online seminars and training via email to prospects who register via a form on my website.
Answering frequently asked questions about services.
Confirming schedule via email of job applicant's interview for the week.
Building Opt-in List of prospects for our live seminars.
Building Opt-in List for a newsletter.

Some applications I have come across are the following:

Reinforcement Programs
Normally use to motivate sales staff, affiliates, and new Customers.

PreSelling or UpSelling
When you have products or services allied or complementing those previously sold to Customers, you can use autoresponders to follow up on Customers and offer these products or services.

Bulletins and Updates
Whether they are prospects, customers, salespeople, tech support, or affiliates, you need to be in constant contact.

You have to do this on autopilot so you can do something else like improving products or services or creating new ones.

Advertisement Tracking

To be able to know where your traffic is coming from or from which ad and website they are getting information, you need a system that captures information from visitors.

You can always use autoresponders to capture membership or subscriptions via a registration form on your website.

If you think an email is a strategic tool for you, you can take extra time to sign-up for free lessons on using autoresponders.

These lessons will come to you via your email.

Website

The Internet when it started did not have the color and dazzle of most websites we see today.

It was just plain text.

It was plain and oftentimes cryptic messages on a great black screen.

The only reason people got or logged into the Internet was to grab or receive information.

It is not color, picture, or sound that people pay access to the Internet. It is information.

Even the blandest or plain-looking website will be inundated with so much traffic if it offers the most needed or critical information.

Information is the real commodity in the Internet nothing else.

The effectiveness of your website can be measured. How?

The most obvious is the traffic count.

The next is the number of downloads.

Then by the number of emails you receive because of the site or your subscription service.

The number of orders actually credited to the web address.

Not all of the above tools will apply to you. You will have to do a bit of experimentation using some of these tools.

You must come up with a way to measure the effectiveness of each. Don't rely on opinion too much.

The reason I got proficient with any of the above tools was that situations have forced me to learn to use them and eventually rely on them in some phase or aspect of my job.

Once you get good results in any of these tools, you will never go back to doing things the old way.

Trust me. The cost savings and the opportunities that will open up to you using new and better tools are really worth the effort and time learning them.

Dimension Three: The Service Process

2021-04-30T10:33:00.001+08:00

Knowing and Improving Your Business Process

We normally just do it without being conscious of how it's done.

The reason: You have always done it that way.

There's always a form somewhere that tells you someone is receiving something in some point in time or at some point in the process.

You will most likely know what was not done rather than what was done exactly because something does not arrive at some point in time or at some point in the process.

To pass on this process to someone, you will most likely do a show-and-tell routine. This usually happens when somebody doing this process for you leave.

Your Show-And-Tell routine:

You show the new guy the general way of doing your stuff describe it in broad terms and then show him how it's done.

This is an approach where your new guy will come to you hours after with a bundle of forms (to ask you how he's going to fill it up).

After that, he is going to ask in what part of some procedure (which you also forgot to tell him) he is going to use the forms.

You tell the guy the process and the forms he is going to fill up in some part of the process.

This is an approach where you use a full day telling him about the voluminous forms he is going to fill up in each part of the stuff you do.

I did a study of a merchandising store several years back. The store had 44 different forms just to track inventory from delivery to store display.

After going through half of your forms, you really won't have time to show him anything else.

You tell the guy how you do your stuff in general terms then proceed to give a blow-by-blow description of the step in each part. Because of the gory details and the far-away look of your new guy, you drop the show-the-forms routine altogether.

You're so dedicated to indoctrinating the new guy of your management style, you show him everything.

You describe the stuff you do, you give him all the colorful details, with specific instructions on how to use forms in each step, and actually, watch him do it himself.

This usually takes weeks and months to finish.

Halfway to your indoctrination program, your accountant calls because of a late income tax return, you have upcoming deliveries pending, and a customer complaining about warranties.

All these usually happen when you least expect the taxman to walk through your door.

You get your new guy to ask the questions because he is going to ask it from the point of view of the dumb or the ignorant.

He is going to ask a lot of questions. He will probably be asking the right ones too.

Don't believe about all that crap on security and confidentiality.

If you are not paying your employee more than half of what you are earning, that employee will be your worst threat to security and confidentiality when he leaves.

If he leaves because he hates you, and your competitor gets hold of your guy, your competitor is going to pay him well to beat you at your own game.

If your guy left because he is smarter than you, you can bet your mother's wedding ring that he is being paid more than half what you are earning.

What have we done so far?

We defined the profile of your customer (Dimension One: The Customer).

You have identified what bugs your customer and have realized the benefits for your customer when his problem is solved and more.

You have come up with a way to remove what is bugging your customer by creating a service. You even have a name for this service.

You have a general idea of how to deliver your service or are at least able to describe it (Dimension Two: The Service Concept).

Now we are going to tie all of these together. We are now going to build a system or structure to make things happen in your business and deliver the product or service you are selling.

We are now going to build your customer service piece by piece.

Building Your Customer Service Process

The critical component that makes a service great is the process. You must have a good picture of how your process works.

In fact, you literally must have some form of picture or diagram of your process.

You must be able to manage the process so you can deliver results. To ensure the integrity and quality of the process, you must be able to have some form of documentation.

Through documentation, you can institutionalize the process and preserve the quality of whatever you deliver.

Make sure you can maintain and protect the integrity of the process and its anticipated results by devising a mechanism for feedback in each stage of the process.

Process Flow

The process flow is the general description of how one part of the service starts and where it terminates.

Usually, it is better represented in a diagram called a process flow chart.

The major parts or chunks of the service are described in boxes connected by a solid line connecting each of the boxes in a logical and sequential flow.

Very easy to state above how it is but putting it on paper is really another thing. When I let the client's staff document their process, they really have no idea what I'm talking about.

You must be able to distinguish between key business processes and procedures.

A process is better represented by boxes and lines while a procedure is really a set of specific steps to get a task done.

What you will see really in a procedure is a title, a short description of what is this procedure (usually includes what is the expected result), and the specific steps for example Steps 1 to 7 on how to start up a machine.

If you have to do this yourself, don't be surprised if your people give you a procedure instead of a process.

9 out of 10 supervisors in departments from different organizations will not be able to diagram their processes clearly.

It's fairly easy to see this.

Simply ask them to diagram the start and the end of the process in their department or team and include the feedback mechanism.

Usually, you don't have to look at the whole process anymore.

Give your most senior operations staff this homework to be submitted the next working day.

Go ahead and try.

When I was doing it for the company I worked for I don't know if I should laugh or cry when I saw their homework, but that was a long time ago.

Management of Process and Results

Most organizations have layers of processes and procedures without really appreciating the purpose or objective of these processes or procedures.

A process must have an objective or purpose. Without any objective or purpose, a process is literally a practice of futility.

It is a formal way of going through the motions.

You must be able to define what the process is supposed to accomplish or to achieve.

Once you know what your process is supposed to accomplish, you must now determine what resources will be needed to make the process work and who should be doing what to complete the different components of the process.

You must synchronize all the tasks and coordinate the people involved to ensure the process works smoothly.

You must be able to establish accountability for the integrity of the process.

Controls must be established to protect the integrity of the process.

You must find a way or institute mechanisms to inform you what is happening at every critical point of the process.

It is also important that you already have the necessary procedure to act when things don't go the way you plan or expect.

Designate someone to be accountable for the integrity of the process and another for the desired results.

If you are frontline staff, you will most definitely be accountable for results.

It is the first-line supervisor, team leader, or immediate superior who will be given the responsibility of ensuring that you follow procedures, keep within standards, and get the resources you need at the right amount and moment to get your job done to achieve the objective.

Documentation of Process

The most significant piece of documentation you should keep is the process flow of your key business processes followed by the process flow chart of your customer service program.

In the process flow chart shall be the key positions responsible for the integrity of the process and key positions or teams responsible for results.

Your documentation of the process flow chart should include where the process begins and where it terminates.

Anyone reading the process flow chart must be able to discern if a document (a report or completed form) is needed to start, complete a key component of the process, or if the component will generate another document.

The duration in man-hours or man-days should also be reflected to provide information regarding the time required to complete each key component of the process.

Documentation of Results

To be able to document results you must know beforehand what results to expect and what exactly to document.

When you are documenting a customer service event, you are confirming two (2) sets of events: the completion of a process; and the delivery of customer benefits (product/service).

The documentation of the completion of a process enables the customer service manager or leader to monitor

the beginning and termination of an event

the proper execution of a process

The documentation of the delivery of customer benefits enables:

the leader to know if delivery has been completed

the customer service staff to confirm or validate acceptance of delivery by the customer and the customer's level of satisfaction

the customer to know and validate that a service has been rendered or a product has been delivered and that the customer service personnel has conducted the delivery in a manner acceptable to the customer

In most service providers, the official receipt and delivery receipt are enough documentation.

The best service organization however institutes a separate documentation process after the completion of delivery.

A telemarketer or account manager can have a delivery and satisfaction checklist and call the customer to validate if indeed delivery was conducted in a manner compliant with internal service standards and according to the customer's satisfaction.

The level or degree of detail is really dependent on the commitment of the organization or service unit to customer service standards.

Feedback Loop

The essential part of managing the customer service process is to get feedback. You must know if every component of the process works and if the results are actually achieved.

You must integrate a feedback mechanism into the process.

The feedback mechanism must do a lot of things for you. It must help you:

Confirm and validate delivery of product or service (achievement of an objective)

Measure your cost of delivery or management of process

Gauge the ability and capability of the process and human resource to deliver product or service (delivery of benefits)

Open a channel of communication with your customer about the content and process of delivery of the product or service

Collect data to improve the content of the product or service or the process of delivery

Determine the state of your relationship with your customer

Assess the conduct of your human resource in the presence of customers

Feedback mechanisms can come in the form of a report, a completed form, a message (an email or fax), a mechanical trigger like a door opening, or an item physically brought in.

It could be anything that will trigger an action or a response from either your customer service team or your customer.

It must be able to capture information about the quality of your service delivery or the end result of such delivery.

The content of your feedback must be actionable or it must have relevance to your ability to respond to the customer or improve your ability to respond.

The bottom line is: What will you do with what you know?

The next post might be something you would want to read through more thoroughly. It touches on specific tools I used to make my work easier in managing Customer Service programs.

Dimension Two: The Service Concept

2021-04-23T10:07:00.001+08:00

Nothing can be more frustrating and painful to a product manager than the prospects of seeing one's product or service at the crossroads of its slow down or demise.

In this case, you should have already taken note of indicators that you are approaching this crossroad.

Unfortunately for start-ups, they do not have the tools or the experience to anticipate this.

A Concept in Constant Evolution

A product or service is always in a constant state of evolution simply because the users of these products or services have needs that change constantly.

If you have a product or service concept that was designed with real customers(as against a perceived one) in mind, the evolution of this product or service will be seen.

A good product or service manager will be able to see it evolving from one stage to another or from one life cycle to the next.

If you got your eye fixed on the target, your customer, you will see their needs changing.

Consequently, you respond to these changes by either adding features to your product or service or changing the product or service entirely.

If you started your customer service program around an offering with no clear product or service concept, you will find yourself in a perpetual state of tweaking your customer service programs without really knowing why some features work and why some don't.

You are the proverbial blind man concluding an elephant is hairy because you're holding its tail.

Now, how do you get your product or service concept right the first time?

You go back to knowing your Customer!

If you think you're doing fine with the way you're managing your customer service, you don't really have to do this.

Good luck!

Haven't you noticed it's easier to compete when most of the enterprises in the community are doing their customer service wrong?

You win by just doing nothing.

Get Your Service Concept Right the First Time

Prior to creating the concept, you must have a very clear idea of what you are trying to do to your perceived customer.

Are you solving a really nagging problem?

Are you removing their "pain" so they can go on doing what they must be doing?

Are you helping them gain more profit or cutting down costs?

Do you know exactly how to solve a problem or remove the pain?

Can you see the process or procedure in your head as it happens?

Can you draw a rough diagram or flow chart of how the process is actually happening?

If you take the product or service apart, can you see how each part functions or leads to another procedure or process?

If you can clearly put the answers to these questions and resolve most of these issues, you now have the raw material to create your service concept.

The Dimensions of A Service (or Product) Concept

The service concept can be created by effectively getting the right combination
of the following:

Features

Features are descriptions or words we use to describe the nice things we see about our products or service we perceive are relevant to the customer or provide triggers in the mind of the customer of what is relevant.

A technical description of a product can be its set of features. Completion dates, duration of service, ancillary products delivered with the service can be the service features.

Benefits

"Benefits" is the generic word we use to refer to the solution our service delivers or the things that ease the customer's "pain".

The benefits must specify exactly what pain is removed, how much cost is lessened, or how much profit is gained.

If you are offering computer maintenance, for example, the benefit of maintenance coverage is less downtime, no unexpected service fees, better management of maintenance cost, assurance of spare parts for the machines covered, and full documentation of asset history and status.

All these benefits are not perceived by the same types of customers.

Users benefit from less downtime and assurance of spare parts.

Your customer's finance department will value the more stable service fees and better management of maintenance costs. Top management will be able to monitor computer assets for purposes of planning and deployment.

Deliverables

Deliverables are items related to or part of the product or service that must physically be handed over to the customer.

It is important that deliverable items be used to mark the beginning and end of the delivery of a product or service.

Deliverables may come in the form of an official receipt, delivery receipt, warranty form, a gift, a coupon, or a report.

Your customer must see a tangible item delivered to signify the beginning and end of service whether that service is paid or for free.

Components

Components are functional parts of a product or service. In a product, this could be very easy to see. It will be quite different looking at a service.

In service, your customer must see you actually doing something for them.

For example, when designing a maintenance service you can probably break the
components of the service into diagnostics, preventive, and remedial service under a brand called Premium Service or Platinum Service.

Product or Service Brand

Your product or service brand is the official or formal name under which you will sell or market your product or service.

Today we generally refer to this as your product or service brand.

You must choose a name that will make your customer remember the product or service and tie that product or service name to you.

You can gain good leverage if the brand name you choose creates a picture in the mind of your customer of the benefits gained from your offering.

Your service concept is a creative combination of all of the above.

Your customer must be able to picture the value of the service or product as it is being used.

The key is that there must be a picture or visualization of the features, components, deliverables working together to deliver the perceived benefits from using or consuming the product or service.

Get your service concept in writing. This is the only way to find out if everybody sees the same thing.

If you or your service team can't seem to agree on the service concept, how can you expect a total stranger like your customer to get a hint of what you're offering is all about.

Here's a hint if you got your service concept right.

Building Your Service Concept

Get your service or product people to work with your marketing or sales guys to come up with a product or service flyer or pamphlet.

Your service or product guys can probably define the components and features.

Your marketing or sales guys must be able to understand and visualize these features and components in their heads.

Both of your product (or service) and marketing (or sales) people must agree on what exactly are the deliverables. These deliverables will constitute the company's "contract" with prospective customers.

Deliverables will definitely end up in the terms and conditions of your service agreement (or contract).

The next step will be to come up with the right choice of text and editorial style to convert these features and components into benefits.

Remember the section "The Customer" where the question "What does your customer need?" was raised to get to know your customer?

The benefits should directly meet the customer's needs!

If all your people seem to agree with what they're doing so far, then you have just nailed down your service or product concept.

Once you roll out a service or product, you need to keep track of how the benefits are delivered or which of your products or services are performing well.

You also need to remind your customer what products or services are delivering the benefits they paid for.

You need a name to go with the product or service and tie this name with the benefits enjoyed by the customer.

You need to create a service or product brand.

This name is what you will commonly see prominently printed on brochures, handbills, flyers, streamers, and pamphlets.

This is your brand.

I have helped develop service concepts for training, computer maintenance, climate control systems, retail, security services, and a number of product and service brands.

Unless customer service and marketing people truly appreciate what makes up a service concept, it will be very hard to weave and connect the many elements of customer service down to doable procedures or delivery systems.

The next post will be about your Service Process. Do log on again!

Dimension One: The Customer

2021-04-16T12:59:00.002+08:00

Who is Your Customer? Oh, yisshhh here we go again.

Don't give me that oh-yiiiissshhh-here-we-go-again, scratch-your-head, and look-at-the-heaven routine.

You should have been asking this question over and over again until you are convinced you truly know who is paying your salary, your rent, your benefits, and hey, your Christmas bonus.

What does your customer need?

What are the current products and services you have that meet this need?

How are you going to deliver these products and services to the customer?

I can bet you have no clear answer to these questions until now.

I would not even wonder if you are five or ten years in the business.

You would think that the question should no longer be an issue because most business should already know their customer before they should even start selling anything.

Unfortunately, most businesses did not start by asking themselves who is their customer.

They started because they saw or have observed somebody making money doing something and they just ended up really following the other guy.

The issue of who is the customer only comes after they start realizing that money comes in a trickle or none at all.

They don't even ask: Who is the customer?

They simply ask why?

Understanding The Same Thing, Thinking The Same Way

Let the lead technical person in your company write his answer to these basic but relevant questions.

What does your customer need?

What is the current product and service you have that meets this need?

How are you going to deliver these products and services to the customer?

Do the same thing with your lead marketing guy.

Don't let them discuss. Just let them write it on scratch paper.

Don't let them write more than seven points. No paragraphs just short key points.

If keywords match, that is a positive thing.

If your two lead persons are the people who define the function, the process, or work methodologies in their respective department, unit, or team, you can conclude that they are in sync.

You can have a lot of perception and coordination problems if this is otherwise.

Then again this is just perception.

You will still need hard facts to validate if what you perceived is the condition that actually exists.
The hard facts you need lay underneath a lot of your data or databases.

You need to analyze what you have.

If your key people say that more than half of your customers are companies rather than home-based people, then your data should tell you that.

Is your data telling you that?

The data you take for granted can yield a very surprising amount of truths about your business.

Are you ready for the truth?

Or is it easier just winging it?

Oh, you're not winging it!

So you're doing SWOT - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats Analysis.

Hey, that's great!

You can read more about SWOT in the post "The Business Plan" and if you have time, you might get a copy of a workshop tool I used for business planning.

Knowing Your Customer Needs

If somebody asks you if you want your car or air-conditioner maintained, you would most likely say no.

Most of the time, we don't find good justification to pay somebody to take care of our most precious assets.

But, when your car or air-conditioner gives up on you on a bad day, you will surely pay up when the repairman gives you the bill.

Why?

Why do you think it is easier to pay up now?

Simple, you now have a problem.

This problem needs to be solved now not later.

Grudgingly you will pay up.

The lesson here is that if you have a solution to the problem and you are around or at least the person with a problem knows you're around, you get to send the customer the bill for your solution.

You get paid.

You get paid every time.

This lesson is telling you: You should know your customer's pain areas.

What bugs them?

What problems irritate them the most and how frequently?

What issues confront them at home or at work?

How much are they spending to get rid of the problem all the time or how much do they pay to get rid of the pain the problem is giving them?

You don't have to go far to get a feel of your customer. Ask yourself what bugs you? What gives you pain?

You must be able to recognize who is actually making the decision to use or to buy.

Know Who Will Benefit the Most

You must know who will actually benefit from what you are offering. This is the user.

You must anticipate that the person, office, or organization making inquiries about your product or service may not eventually end up using your product or service.

Have you ever observed your customer using the product?

Do they actually use it the way it was designed to be used?

Are there other uses for the service or product that you have not actually seen?

Are there other benefits aside from what you anticipated the product or service should deliver?

Do the benefits actually derived are as perceived?

The thinking process or the decision process that follows is as unique as the ultimate users of your product or service.

Although you cannot change the product or service, you can, however, vary the way the product or service will be perceived.

The customer service program must accommodate these varied perceptions and decision-making processes in its design.

The process therefore that supports your communication may not look at its ultimate customer the same way as your delivery process.

The communication process may be designed primarily to support technical evaluators and decision-makers but your delivery process may be designed to support the ultimate user of your product or service.

When I used to sell computer maintenance services, I have seen how the service is perceived by different users.

Management sees maintenance as protection of assets, the department using the computers sees it as a support and leverage against downtime, and finance sees it as both cost and as a good source of information for determining how computer assets are actually used.

You can see that your perceived customer for the same service may not just be one category.

In my experience, even reports, if you package it well, can be a distinct service the aim of which is to satisfy the need of another set of customers inside an organization.

You can bill customers for more comprehensive reports aside from the usual incident reports that go with the statement of account.

This is assuming you have a good process for documenting the results of a specific service.

Know Where the Customer Is in His State of Need

Customers don't grow the same way and at the same rate.

These alone should tell you that even customers from the same category or industry will not necessarily have identical requirements in their "need" evolution or maturity.

Customer Service programs must appreciate that customers grow.

Your programs must evolve with your customer.

The variation and growth of customer needs must also translate into varied services that specifically serve a customer in a phase or stage of its growth.

When I created a service concept for maintaining personal computers, I already anticipated that we need to support these PCs once they get linked physically through cables.

Not only did we anticipate the physical inter-connectivity but we did see the coming of the nuances of managing this connected hardware resource through different network operating systems.

Why did we anticipate it? Did we suddenly see the future of Microsoft of Novell? Did we see the network operating system coming to the market?

Actually, what we saw was more mundane. We saw the ease by which new users came to adapt desktop PCs into the workplace.

We knew something as good and as easy to use as desktops will become a necessity to ordinary office workers just as calculators were.

We simply saw desktops PCs growing in number in our heads as the business grew.

We see more people getting hired to do more things.

I already saw that we were going to see different needs coming from this growth.

Eventually, I had to study the difference between Microsoft Windows NT and Novell NetWare.

I had to talk to our most experienced service team leaders in the Engineering Division.

We had to change the way we respond to customers contemplating connecting their PCs.

I have to get my Marketing Assistants new sets of reference materials and develop most of them from scratch so they can respond to questions about the different networking technologies even those that were not yet commercially available.

I already drafted a new version of our maintenance agreement specifically tailored for the new networking technologies even though there were no inquiries yet about maintenance services for computer networks.

I firmly believed that we had to be ready for a new phase of growth in our customer's IT needs.

It was a bit funny looking back at it because we were already creating a service concept for a need that even the customers have not anticipated nor signified they would look for.

The process and the forms I had put in place did help tremendously to capture the customer data I can use to anticipate the customer need that evolved.

Knowing Where Is Your Customer

You must be able to know where is your customer at certain times or frequencies.

Do you find him in a mall, in a convention, in his home on a weekend?

Is he in tune with a certain TV or cable channel?

Where does he get his news?

Is it from early morning news (radio or TV) or is he subscribing to some form of periodical?

You must not only know where he is physically but where his mind is at a certain moment.

What is he thinking about on a Monday or midnight Saturday?

What occupies his mind during summer, Christmas or Halloween?

What is the customer most likely going to do or where he is going to be on a holiday?

In the customer's phase of growth (start-up, ongoing or mature), do you offer services that benefit them while they are a start-up?

Is there another service if they start branching out? Or can you still serve them when they start opening up satellite offices in other cities?

Will you be able to serve them just as efficiently and as cost-effectively?

Is the size and quality of your human resource up to the challenge?

Is your cost accounting structure flexible to accommodate the creation of new forms of cost? Is your own expansion seen as a cost or investment?

Are your training programs progressive enough to adapt to the changing and expanding responsibilities of your team?

Know Who Will Actually Pay

The most important thing is to discern who will actually pay--The decision-maker.

If you have to remember anything about knowing your customer this last thing should be it.

Most of the mistakes salespeople make when qualifying institutional prospects, is in not understanding the decision-making process of organizations.

You will not be able to pin down who will eventually sign the check if you do not understand the decision-making process of your customer's organization.

Your communication process for reporting action taken or easing up payment terms and writing your terms and conditions in a service agreement may be greatly affected by the perception and action of the person eventually paying for the service or product.

Getting Your Customer Profile Right

Do you have a list of your primary customers who contributed 80% of your gross revenue last year?

(Remember the official receipts and the delivery receipts? This is the place to start.)

Can you tell which products or services did your primary customers buy or pay for? (See, you're still going back to that delivery receipt and official receipts.)

How much of each of the products or services did they buy? (Need I say more?)

Do you know which of your customers were the most expensive to serve or the cheapest?

Can you rank your products and services according to net profit contribution?

Which of your customers was paying for the products or services providing the most net profit contribution?

Can you categorize your customer under a special group or groups based on the services delivered and mode of payment?

What is the demographic profile of the contact persons in your institutional customers?

Is there a common profile in terms of age, industry, sex, civil status, length of service in the company, rank, etc.?

Are certain groups of customers using certain products or services because of their industry, location, size, market share, market niche, profitability, etc.?

Do you have quantitative and qualitative descriptions of your existing customer?

The problem really is that most entrepreneurs either don't care about customers or don't really consider knowing customers as an important part of their day job.

You as an entrepreneur have to change the way you see your customer.

You have to change the way you take in or see things.

When you started as an entrepreneur, you were great at doing it.

Eventually, you will have to shift from being the Big Boss to being a manager with a system and a process.

You must evolve.

But then again, you may need to satisfy your ego first. It may take a while before you get over that.

Usually, you'll be saying something like: "I've lasted this long in this business, why would I need to change myself at this point in my success!"

I guess you're an immortal and not too worried about getting old and dying like the rest of us.

Yeah! Go right ahead. Don't change.

Even the biblical Moses took so long to make up his mind before realizing he was the One.

God had to orchestrate a lot of difficult circumstances before Moses came to the right frame of mind and took cognizance of what ought to be.

He single-handedly convinced the Jews that they need to look at a greater plan.

His management style was not near any form of democracy we know now.

Even Moses had to accept that he has to change his management style.

I read Moses was more than 80 years old before God asked him to delegate to 10 capable men.

With each of the ten selecting ten more down their own tribes or clans.

It was the first official act of delegation with a specific structure ever recorded on a document--The Bible.

It may not be a coincidence that the oldest and most successful of the militaristic states and societies have subscribed to this formula of delegation.

Even God believed in changing structure and management style. He practically dictated the span of management to Moses.

You may like being a superstar and just winging it!

You'll probably be around the next hundred years or so managing your business and not worried about where you're really going, who's taking over, and who's supervising who.

Moses had his job literally cut out for him because God literally wrote the rules for him. The Egyptians were literally sick of him. The Red Sea was hands down a split decision which eventually led to the Egyptians being overwhelmed with a sea of challenges.

Eventually, Moses did accept his fate to be The Leader who was going to lead the Jews out of Egypt and into the Promise Land.

Customer Service: Who Is Your Customer?

2021-04-09T15:44:00.001+08:00

Customer Service is easier to comprehend if we believe that the universal concept of good manners should also be considered common business sense.

When you look at it, organizations are made up of people.

Ultimately, the Customer even if your business documents say it's a corporation will always end up being a human being.

Have you ever seen a corporation as a machine?

We must therefore understand what we are really offering. We must know who are we doing all these for.

Who Is Your Customer?

When identifying Customers from the Customer Service perspective, you are only looking at two (2) major kinds: Internal and External Customers.

People in your organization who need your products or services to get their jobs done are your Internal Customers.

On the other hand, people or organizations outside yours who require and buy your product or service to satisfy a need or solve a problem are your External Customers.

You need to know the distinction between the two for purposes of managing processes and measuring results.

Both require respective Customer satisfaction metrics in some way to measure the quality of service or product delivery.

Your concern for Internal Customers is cost-driven while for External Customers it is revenue and profit-margin-driven.

The approaches to communication and service delivery will be different.

The proximity of Internal Customers to you makes it relatively easy to deliver Internal Customer service.

External Customers however will require different media or channels to communicate to you.

You will have no way to determine where your External Customers are, physically and in mind, at any given moment to specifically trigger communication.

If you are working for a retailing organization selling microcomputers and their accessories and providing maintenance service, you will have Internal and External Customers.

Your Accounting Department may have people who will be using PCs that will need your maintenance service.

It will be quite odd to tell accounting to go call your competitor for the service you already have in-house.

Your External Customer may be a company, individual or any organization using PCs that may need your services.

The quality of the delivery and the constitution of "good" Customer Service is hinged on the expectations of that Customer and the execution of the service.

Beyond the measurable results, the quality of the service or product is really based on how close we are to meeting and satisfying customer expectations.

Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder

2021-04-02T20:42:00.001+08:00

The book "Business Model Generation" was written by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur with the participation of 470 practitioners from 45 countries the objective of which is to come up with a simple, relevant, and intuitively understandable representation of how a business works.

The model is supposed to become a shared language among those who wish to create new strategic alternatives.

This common language is supposed to allow us to challenge our assumptions about the four main areas of a business: customers, offer, infrastructure, and financial viability.

From these four main areas of business, the Business Model introduced by Dr. Osterwalder and Dr. Pigneur can best be demonstrated via the nine basic building blocks that present how a company makes money.

These building blocks are key partners, key activities, key resources, value proposition, customer relationships, channels, customer segments, cost structure, and revenue streams.

Under infrastructure are three (3) building blocks: key partners, key activities and key resources.

Key Activities
These are the most critical activities that will deliver your enterprise's value proposition.

The things you need to do to move assets so you can deliver value to your customers.

Key Resources
The resources you need to create value for your customer.

These are the assets deployed to support the business and make enterprise sustainable.

Partner Network
The necessary relationships you create and nurture between you and your suppliers to maximize gains from activities and reduce risks.

These relationships enable you to focus on your core activity.

Relationships include strategic alliances created between competitors and non-competitors such as joint ventures, cooperative alliances, etc.

Under the area of offering is your value proposition.

According to Alexander Osterwalder, your enterprise's value proposition is what distinguishes you from your competitor.

The value proposition is achieved through design, branding, status, price, risk reduction, convenience, usability, newness, customization, performance, etc.

The area of business that helps you focus on Customers is customer relationships, channels, and customer segments.

Customer Relationships
Customer Relationships are driven by the business need to acquire customers, to retain them, and the expedient goal of generating more sales from each customer from each distinct group.

Customer Segments
According to the book "Business Model Generation", customer groups represent separate segments if

• Their needs require and justify a distinct offer
• They are reached through different Distribution Channels
• They require different types of relationships
• They have substantially different profitabilities
• They are willing to pay for different aspects of the offer

Customer segments can be Mass Market, Niche Market, Segmented, Diversified, and Multi-sided Platform/Market.

Channels
According to Dr. Osterwalder, channels have five (5) distinct phases: awareness, evaluation, purchase, delivery, and after-sales.

In Awareness, we ask ourselves the question "How do we raise awareness about our company’s products and services?"

In the Evaluation phase, we need to help customers evaluate our organization’s Value Proposition.

When we get to the Purchase phase we seek out ways to allow customers to purchase specific products and services.

The question of how to deliver a Value Proposition to customers is the focus of the Delivery phase.

Once we have delivered our value proposition, we are now in the After-Sales phase where we figure out how to provide post-purchase customer support.

Finances always come in two (2) dimensions: The cost structure on one hand and the revenue stream on the other.

The business must determine where its revenue stream is coming from.

Will revenues come from transactions resulting from one-time customer payments or is it from recurring revenues coming from ongoing payments?

An enterprise can generate revenues from the sale of assets, usage fees, subscription fees, lending, renting leasing, licensing, brokerage fee or advertising.

The cost structure describes the cost that your enterprise incurs when it operates a business model.

You must understand how to distinguish between cost-driven and value-driven structures.

Are you leaning towards a simple reduction of cost to deliver value or are you focusing more on the creation of value instead of minimizing cost?

Business Model Generation is a concept that entrepreneurs can use to get an insight into their existing business and to create an enterprise the way they want it.

You can read these exciting possibilities in the book.

The book by Dr. Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur is available from Amazon Books.

The Six Dimensions of Customer Service

2021-03-19T17:37:00.001+08:00

Do you really know what your customer service is for?

If you know what it is for, do you understand exactly what you should be doing to efficiently and cost-effectively deliver this to your customer?

Customer Service is a concept that is usually presented as a collection or patches of complementing activities done by an individual or a group of individuals.

It is seldom presented as a process or a system that an organization manages to seamlessly and effectively deliver solutions (product or service) to customers.

The conventional approach is to teach people to respond to customers using the telephone or handle a live person-to-person interaction especially when there is a dissatisfied or complaining customer.

The way I see it, you never have to resort to complaint management or scripted response to customers if you have done service delivery or created a truly satisfying product in the first place.

Most of the customer service programs are actually damage control or image protection ploys.

I am also a customer for many services and most of these customer service programs are really just cheap scams or are downright shameful tactics to evade doing additional after-sales commitments.

You never have to handle complaints if you avoid hiring callous and stupid people.

You never get callous and stupid people if you didn't promote a callous and stupid person to be a supervisor or department head who got this person in the first place.

You never promote much less hire a callous and stupid person if you have a good recruitment policy.

Even if you did hire the right person, this person will not be able to function if you don't have a sensible service or product.

They can't handle customers if you don't have a good process to allow them to get their job right.

Your support staff won't be able to do his job right because he can't understand his job description (if you have one).

What I'm telling you is that all the components and dimensions making up your customer service program are tightly connected to each other.

You need to understand that you will not be able to build a customer service program by simply training people or coming up with the process.

You need to tie all components or dimensions together.

You must serve the right customer with the right product or service concept.

This concept must be supported by a seamless process and effective tools. This process must be managed and tools used by members of your staff having the right attitude and aptitude for the job.

You cannot maintain the right process, invest in the best tools or hire good people if you do not have a business plan that will make you viable.

You cannot have or make all of these dimensions happen or come at the right moment if you don't work as a team.

It took me more than five years to discern that most of the things I have done to build programs in support of customers seem to fall in a logical cluster of relationships and processes within the organization.

When I plan my approach to build a good customer service program, they all seem to fall almost always into six logical components or what I call dimensions.

I like to refer to it as dimension because it seems easier to perceive it if it is not seen as a logical sequence of events or time-specific evolution in an organization.

In my experience, you can literally deliver customer service in a box if you can build all these dimensions gradually and then tie them all together.

You can do it simultaneously or you may choose to work on one dimension at a time. It does not matter.

What matters is that you must work on it with the intention of tying it together sometime, somehow.

All the things that you will do to build your customer service program will most likely be within the realm of the following dimensions: The Customer, The Service Concept, The Service Process, The Tools, The Business Plan, and The Team.

Indicators of Weak Customer Service Programs

2021-03-12T17:33:00.001+08:00

I don't know if people who buy service or expensive products do this but ever since I started getting evaluated for customer service quality, I began to compare everything I do in customer service to every store or shop that I patronize.

I am very optimistic that those who are good at the basics of customer service will grow whether they like it or not.

Do you know why I truly believe this?

There is so much bad service out there that doing the basic things like courtesy, listening, and actually doing something for customers will look exceeding exceptional in the eyes of a customer.

Let's take a look at a great number of indicators to open your eyes on things you should NOT or NEVER do!

The customer is often or usually talking to the owner, supervisor or general manager regarding issues of service delivery that are basic or mundane better delegated to rank-and-file.

Customers who call by phone will not get ready answers to inquiries nor get issues resolved within minutes or will not be referred to the "right" person who can resolve the issue or respond to the inquiry.

Service agreements or terms and conditions of delivery are filled with clauses of what the customer cannot have or what the customer will do that will void the agreement or violate the terms & conditions of the service. Some of the terms and conditions I've seen in computer maintenance are so full of things that can't be done, the sales people were finding it hard to explain exactly what they will deliver.

Written communications related to customer issues are evasive and are normally written in a legal or lawyer's editorial style or tone. You may have heard of service companies who take their customers to expensive lunch meetings because that's the only thing they can really do right and which they don't deliver themselves.

Service personnel are overly cautious when responding to issues related to terms and conditions of delivery and will be non-committal when communicating with customers regarding action to be taken.

Personnel responding to customers are curt and seem to exhibit arrogance when requested to clarify issues or when interacting with customers. There are even truly obnoxious and rude characters who are just being arrogant as a ploy to hide a plain old fashion rip-off. These are genuine con artists who should be behind bars rather than behind the service counter.

Service personnel are not keeping records of tasks or are using forms (some don't even have them) that are either poorly designed, printed in so many copies or going through unnecessary layers of procedures that tend to frustrate customers rather than help them.

There simply is no system in place for the business to gather information or data about customers. The service people seem to have the habit of passing you to different people or offices in the guise of "escalation" without explaining why.

The people are just downright or simply sloppy exhibited by dirty work area, poorly groomed service personnel, inappropriate uniforms, bad layout of service area, poor communication skills, and apparent lack of training even in the most elementary procedures of phone handling or management of customer complaints.

Poorly labeled or misleading labels on products or services.

The business is simply selling products or service with a branding strategy that smells like a scam or rip off more than anything else.

Exaggerated and use of worn out claims in advertisements. If it's too good to be true, it's really too good to be true.

It takes so long for a walked-in customer to get prompt human contact or interaction from frontline staff. If you're standing in a reception area for five minutes without any staff acknowledging your presence, you're in there too long.

Had enough?

You should!

I had enough of bad service a long time ago!

I'll take you down a road where you never have to be the bad guy in Customer Service.

You might think that I have some secret or sophisticated technique behind all these customer service concepts but honestly, I don't.

What I have is an experience in the simple things in business and lots of common sense. I want you to read and read between the lines.

The best Customer Service managers are very good at the basics.

You will too.

Nurturing Relationship with Customers in the Face of Global Uncertainty

2021-03-05T14:03:00.001+08:00

The financial crisis that swept the US and sent tremors to most of the European Union is definitely one of many global uncertainties we hope we never have to face but unfortunately has now entered our front doors.

There is no escaping this.

Those who are still in denial and have not planned contingencies will find themselves with a company with no more assets or working for another owner.

During the Asian crisis, the only thing we could do was prepare for the worse.

I was working for an IT company providing maintenance services to computer network systems.

We had to get down to the painful process of re-assessing what we really have in terms of receivables, projected sales, and current cash flows.

Managing a marketing group at that time was so painful because I was there witnessing and causing a lot of good people to leave.

I trained these people and some may have to use what we have taught them somewhere else.

The Asian crisis hit us at a time when most of our projections were already carved in stone.

Dropping brands and replacing others was such an emotionally loaded process for some of my salespeople who have built their relationships and competence around a certain product brand.

Even before that crisis, I already knew that the only way we can assure constant profitability and sustainability was to nurture a critical mass of customers.

We have to do the math.

We have to calculate to a certain degree of confidence how much each of our customers was contributing to our annual revenues: which ones provided the highest margins and which ones were the least costly to serve.

It was a learning process for both Marketing and Technical Support teams learning that less than 20% of our more than 300 customers under contract yielded 80% of our revenue in the maintenance service category.

Maintenance services contribute 40% of our overall revenue every year.

It also contributes the most profit margin after the first year of the contract.

We ranked and grouped them in such a way that those who constitute 80% of our revenues were now assigned to the most dependable Account Executives.

No account executive was supposed to handle more than 10 of these accounts.

I handled the most difficult accounts (accounts with mission-critical servers).

It was a tedious process of looking into each of our accounts and doing the following:

Updated their profiles.
Determined the impact of the crisis on each of our customers (ability to acquire, expand, continue maintenance, recruit new people)
Current products and services we have delivered and projected to be delivered to the customer
Impact of the crisis on our own products and services and our ability to deliver them
Impact on pending orders (delivery period, price, discounts, etc.)

It was a top priority to start doing courtesy visits instead of cutting down on the visits or customer calls.

In an economic crisis, sticking to the basics can force you to consider what you totally ignored in more complacent times--your existing customers.

You will start getting the most simple and elementary notes on customer service: Using basic customer service strategy for customer acquisition and retention.

Let's get back to basics about acknowledging who are your customers.

When identifying Customers in the Customer Service perspective, you are only looking at two (2) major kinds: Internal and External Customers.

People in your organization who need your products or services to get their jobs done are your Internal Customers.

On the other hand, people or organizations outside yours who require and buy your product or service to satisfy a need or solve a problem are your External Customers.

You need to know the distinction between the two for purposes of managing processes and measuring results.

Both require respective Customer satisfaction metrics in some way to measure the quality of service or product delivery.

Your concern for Internal Customers is cost-driven while for External Customers it is revenue and profit-margin-driven.

The approaches to communication and service delivery will be different.

The proximity of Internal Customers to you makes it relatively easy to deliver Internal Customer service.

External Customers however will require different media or channels to communicate to you.

You will have no way to determine where your External Customers are, physically and in mind, at any given moment to specifically trigger communication.

If you are working for a retailing organization selling microcomputers and their accessories and providing maintenance service, you will have Internal and External Customers.

Your Accounting Department may have people who will be using PCs that will need your maintenance service.

It will be quite odd to tell accounting to go call your competitor for the service you already have in-house.

Your External Customer may be a company, individual or any organization using PCs that may need your services.

The quality of the delivery and the constitution of "good" Customer Service is hinged on the expectations of that Customer and execution of service.

Beyond the measurable results, the quality of the service or product is really based on how close we are to meeting and satisfying customer expectations.

Customer Service: Dealing With An Upset Customer

2020-10-20T23:34:00.008+08:00

The real test of your internal processes, people's competence, training and culture will be during a situation where a Customer actually makes known a complaint or a gripe.

Imagine a Customer as a kettle full of boiling water.

The growing sentiment of the Customer is the flame underneath the kettle. Picture the Customer's patience as the steam builds up inside the kettle.

Your approach to the Customer complaint is like your hand on the stove slowly turning the temperature between 30 degrees to 100 degrees Celsius.

You Are Dealing With A Human Being
Even the best products or services delivered by the most impeccable Customer service program will hit a snag in one way or another in a matter of time.

The human factor of any system will always be its weakest link.

Look, you are only human.

It could be your fault or the Customer's fault. The Customer is most certainly human too.

It doesn't matter.

In the end, it's the Customer's sentiment that will dictate the course of action.

The Tension First, Information Later
Obviously, the action to take if someone is about to blow up is to let off some pressurized steam.

Let the Customer do the talking.

This is where body language comes in.

You must maintain eye contact always. A nod to show affirmation and respond with an affirmative expression from time to time.

There's always this temptation to "label" customers or fall into stereotyping. Such a trap can be disabling if you are the very person who is supposed to find out more about the problem and take action later.

The frequently forgotten but important action is empathy.

Your Customer must feel that you understand his or her situation and how he or she feels about it.

Your attention, your facial expression, and your confirmation must all say that you do understand and you do care.

Now The Problem
Once you have confirmed with your Customer the situation, you must now initiate a proactive approach to solving the problem.

If you have a process that can be activated to resolve the issue then go ahead and explain how the process works.

If not, you may have to tell him again about his situation to confirm to him you have taken notes and you understood his narration.

Check the facts and refer the issue to the people who can take action or make a decision on the matter.

The Solution And The Action
If you and the Customer have agreed on what the facts and the issues are, it is now time to come to an agreement on the best action to take.

Confirm with the Customer how he wants the issue resolved. Present possible solutions or courses of action.

The Customer must confirm if the possible outcome of the solution or course of action is acceptable.

You need to be dependable and reliable. You must keep your promise.

Follow up and keep the Customer informed.

Make sure all the concerned parties are informed and updated.

Deliver.

If possible do more and exceed expectations.

Customer Service and Your Body Language

2020-10-18T21:49:00.001+08:00

Your expensive brochures and advertisement can say a lot of great and cool things about your business, your products, your services, and how you do your business.

Themes and slogans show screaming words like

"We are the Expert",
"The Authority",
"We Care" or
"We are the Leader".

These advertisements are no doubt expensive.

The purpose of all these costs is to "pull" or "push" the Customers in. When the customer walks in and meets you or your people, one of the first things that will catch their attention is your body language.

Tactical interrogators in the military and intelligence services all over the world have used sophisticated techniques to read people's minds.

Even these experts admit that the most basic techniques are still largely contingent on how well the body is observed during direct interrogation.

Keep in mind three (3) things when the Customer has visual access to you:

· Posture,
· Facial Expression, and
· Eye Contact.

An upright posture can project self-confidence just as a slouching posture shows inferiority. Your body can show your Customer if you are sincerely interested in what he's saying or not.

Your face can deliver multiple messages with even the subtlest twitching. The most significant facial expression you can show is your smile.

The next most significant feature of your face is your eyes.

Customers appreciate it most if you look at them in the eye when you talk to them.

Most believe the eyes can show a lot of sincerity if it exists in a conversation.

Needless to say, you need to focus your eyes on the person you're talking to.

Your disposition with Customers may be discerned from how and where you look.

Another important "body language" that will get the customer's attention is a happy disposition.

It may be too presumptuous to say that a happy disposition can be acquired through training - this certainly takes time - but the best approach to get Customers to meet happy people in your organization is to get happy people during recruitment in the first place.

Happy people are more likely to internalize good posture, smile, and make eye contact.

They are also better able to handle customers when the going gets rough.

Customer Service: Knowing What Works and What Doesn't

2020-10-17T20:39:00.007+08:00

There are no hard and fast rules in Customer Service, only best practices. Many have tried and experienced rewards for doing this right. There are best ways to do this and there are wrong ways.

Now, we learn what works and what doesn't!

What Works, What Doesn't!

Saying you don't know just won't hack it with Customers.

It's better to tell them you will find out or seek out the answers.

Don't tell Customers that it is not your job to even listen.

Tell the Customer you can help or find out yourself.

Don't do a hand-washing "that's not my fault" speech.

Tell the Customer what you can possibly do for him however insignificant this action may be to you. This also means that saying you can't do anything about the issue is a definite No-no.

A simple apology can calm a Customer down better than actually telling him to calm down.

Don't even use the old "I'm busy right now" excuse.

You might find out the hard way that people can really be very creative in finding "painful" and "nasty" ways to get your attention.

If the Customer writes a letter, respond with one.

Do give the Customer a call if he or she clearly indicates a phone number and a request for a call. Don't ever ignore a written request for assistance or complaint.

Most of the time, people who find time to write will find time to give another copy of the letter to someone who can take legal action.

Document Your Customer Interaction and Learn

Document all your interactions with Customers. You will find out that within a year, most Customer concerns can be addressed with a simple "Frequently Asked Questions" or FAQ brochures and pamphlets. This is the reason why websites are making FAQs a distinct page.

You can also use autoresponders to make a more uniform content but personalized approach.

Study this option and make it available to all your frontline people.

Clearly, we intend to delight our new Customers and make truly loyal friends with our present ones.

Being proactive and finding ways to help and satisfy customers rather than being passive will generally be a good yardstick of whether or not something is good for the Customer or not.

You can read these lessons and recite them well, but it is in truly putting these lessons in action can you really benefit from them.

If we truly practice what we learn, we tend to act them out of habit.

Actions can truly shout louder than words.

Our body language will show this to be true.

Customer Service: Developing The Good Habit

2020-10-15T20:40:00.022+08:00

Customer Service is really the exercise of the most elementary rules in courtesy, respect, and people relationship.

It matters more in the day-to-day interaction with people.

Good Customer Service must not be developed solely as a process but a habit worth doing every day.

Knowing Who Is Your Real Boss: Your Customer

You must learn to classify your Customer as to the most important part of your job.

Your Customer pays for your services or products that solve problems for them. If they don't pay, you lose revenues.

No revenue, no paycheck.

It's very clear at the end of the day who The Boss really is.

Exceeding Expectations

The Customers of today are becoming more aware and critical of service quality.

As a result, organizations that deliver more than they promise tend to be remembered.

To delight customers, you, therefore, have to underpromise and over-deliver.

Not that you should hold back on telling the Customer what your business can do but more importantly meeting the Customers' expectations at the basic level, then giving more upon delivery.

Basic Customer expectations will vary from business to business but it is possible to formulate those expectations from industry practices and/or what you think should go into the delivery of your product or service to please customers.

In a market when almost all offerings look and sound identical, delivering more than the promise of or regular benefits to Customers creates stronger and more lasting impressions.

Going the extra mile for Customers can strengthen relationships.

When Customers are witness to your willingness to go the extra mile, they can sometimes even overlook occasional shortcomings.

Offer More and Better Options

If you have more options for customers, they are less likely to look somewhere else.

If their choices are better offered by existing alternatives, they are more likely to think only of you even if their initial decision may not be their final choice.

You should consistently evaluate the options you offer your Customers.

Each on their own must be a valid alternative given a certain set of expectations.

Keeping Your Promise

After you and the Customer have reached a point of agreement, you must be able to deliver the promise or the Customer's perceived benefits.

Always without exception, deliver your promise even if such promised benefit is a result of a compromise.

The idea of going the extra mile may not be appreciated by the Customer if you can't deliver the core benefits.

Be On-Time

When you meet Customers be on Time.

If you promise to call at a certain time, do it as promised.

If you are lucky enough to be given the order or job, deliver on time.

Certain products or services are critical components of a Customer's business process.

If they don't get these products or services on time, there will be consequences.

Be on time.

Express Empathy

Customers will find it easier to open up about their "needs" if frontline staff who interacts with them can relate with empathy.

It is even easier for them to give a hint of how the relationship should proceed if your staff can handle issues with empathy.

Empathy cannot be expressed in any other way except by being up close and personal.

Provide Channels of Communication

Your Customer must have several alternatives to reach you.

It is unfortunate that even the basic skills in handling telephone conversations are still absent in most frontline staff in sales and marketing.

Most organizations think that a 1-800 number offers comfort to Customers.

An incompetent person handling the Customer in the other line can spell a difference between a lasting relationship and a legal liability.

Provide them more than just a phone number.

Technology now offers alternatives: email, chat, forums, and mobile phones.

Develop a Happy Disposition and Working Environment

A happy disposition can be a very disarming picture even for an upset Customer.

It has more to do with culture than policy.

If the selection process tends to select a happy person, you can expect the working environment and relationships to be healthy and productive.

It is easy to encourage sales and service personnel to smile if the working environment allows it.

A happy disposition bridges culture and provides opportunities to establish rapport with Customers and nurturing a long-term relationship.

Co-workers Are Customers Too

Have you ever come across a scene where store supervisors treat frontline staff in a department store with little respect?

It is ironic that the same supervisors or the general management expect these same staff to treat their customers with courtesy.

The bottom line is that the concept of courtesy and customer service, in general, are more real to your frontline people if it is applied to them as if they were external Customers.

Co-workers are persons too, who deserve to be treated like Customers.

They are, after all, your Internal Customers.

There are no fast or hard rules in Customer Service, however, you must know the best practices based on other people's experiences and mistakes.

Learn what works, and what doesn't.

Customer Service: Your Customer's Expectations

2020-10-14T10:18:00.020+08:00

You really have just about fifteen minutes to establish rapport if you approach a Customer in his office, and about less than that in seconds, after eye contact to establish rapport with a walk-in Customer.

In spite of this observation, almost all salespeople lose a Customer by consistently doing the initial contact wrong.

It's even worse in succeeding contacts.

If you have just anticipated what is the "conversation" going in the Customer's head before you saw him or before he walks into your store, you would have handled the initial contact right the first time.

You must understand at least the "raw" form of the Customer's expectations.

Read This!

A REAL-LIFE EXAMPLE.

One day in my past life, a director of our company started going around distributing a list of needs and emailing computer retailers of our requirements for a computer system which was supposed to be paid for by a grant from the Netherlands.

Everyone without exception did the initial contact wrong.

The first one called could not refer the director to the right person. The director got passed on to three more persons until the last person just told him the simple fact that the owner was not around to attend to her request.

Our director asked if the email address on their website is current. Nobody could even answer exactly what email address the director was talking about.

They don't even browse their own website.

Unbelievable.

One retailer that recently opened, did not do better.

With all the glitzy look of the facade and the showroom, the whole visual effect turned into a charade when three ladies in a booth in the middle of the showroom waited (for more than five minutes) for the director to ask them who was in charge.

One looked up and just went on reading something while the other two pretended she wasn't around.

By the way, this is one indicator of incompetence. Pretending the customer is not there.

The director was forced to ask the lady who looked up first, who can help her out.

She was probably irked that the director picked her among the three of them.

The director was beginning to guess they do this all the time to customers and are becoming highly adept at feeling "invisible customers" walking around the showroom.

The director picked one of the ladies and asked her who is in charge. It was then that the lady "realized" she was alive and actually talking, she pointed the director to a counter.

A technician told the director the person's name and told her to wait. A lady came out and was decent enough to make the list.

She actually called the director the same afternoon.

Another retailer requested the director to email her shopping list. She did email the long shopping list.

They did respond.

They quoted item one and that's it.

The director wondered if she actually sent anything to them since that was it: One item from a very long list.

No note or indication if they actually read the list or if she was really the intended recipient of the quote because the quote had somebody else's name on it.

At least the person who made the quote knows how to use email.

If this doesn't sound familiar, you either are not observing your people in action or you just missed the opportunity to see how badly your competitors are treating their own customers.

Either way, you lose because you are consistently driving away customers and you don't know why.

The painful thing is you are actually subsidizing this atrocity to customers by employing the people who is turning your customers to life-long enemies.

END OF REAL-LIFE EXAMPLE.

The Universal Application of Simple Courtesy

When our director walked into these retailers, the least she expected was courtesy followed by responsiveness.

All these retailers failed miserably in these most elementary criteria.

If you look at the advertisement of these retailers you will probably see these keywords in their flyers and brochures:

"Satisfaction Guaranteed",

"Customer First",

"You Are Number One!",

"The First in Customer Satisfaction"

All that hollow slogans.

The most ignorant of your Customers will no longer fall for that crap in your advertisement.

They probably pass through dozens of billboards screaming the same hollow slogans before they got to your store to pick up any impressions from your advertising materials.

What will make a lasting impression is what you or your people will do when he walks in.

Customer Expectations

Responsiveness. The least that your Customer will expect from you is responsiveness.

Do you or your people respond to Customers in a timely manner?

Excuse me but a grunt and a blank stare do not exactly fall under the category of response in Customer Service.

Confidence. If you or your people respond, Customers expect you to conduct yourselves confidently.

Customers "want" to find somebody they can lay their trust on.

Your confidence, especially your demonstrated confidence, will immediately build that trust.

Of course, your people must actually show they are competent and have knowledge in the specific or limited specialty the Customer is seeking.

Caring Attitude. Your organization must show that it cares by having people who actually exhibit a caring attitude towards Customers, serve Customers on a regular basis.

Your people can demonstrate they care if they implement support processes with empathy and respect for Customers.

Reliability. When you can respond and conduct yourself confidently with a caring attitude for Customers with consistency and effectiveness, Customers will naturally rely on you.

This reliance can easily translate to loyalty.

Isn't this the ultimate goal of Customer Service? Customer loyalty.

Physical Impressions. People generally have a perception that the way your surrounding looks reflect the organization's character.

They observe your office design and layout, your uniforms, your employees' demeanor, and the general look of the workplace.

It is also important to remember that your physical appearance as a person or as an organization will also, in a way, condition the Customer's conduct in your presence or his general attitude to your offering or organization.

Once you understand the "conversation" in your Customer's mind, you have made a significant step in approaching his comfort zone.

If you have an honest-to-goodness mechanism to appreciate the Customer's expectation, you now have to proceed to develop the habit of offering good Customer Service.

Customer Service Myth: Customer Service is for the Big Boys

2020-10-03T22:54:00.013+08:00

Every time I have a casual talk with friends and even former clients about business, the conversation tends to drift towards the challenges of the markets and getting customers (or keeping them). Since customers are drivers of revenues in any business regardless of business models, quite naturally, it is a topic of interest to small business owners.

The usual concern is the question of costs and investment in any customer service initiative. The usual conclusion also is that the running costs and investments made on customer service make small enterprise owners perceive that customer service is the big boys’ game. My conclusion: It’s a Myth.

Most think that on average, interaction with the customer using sleek and expensive collaterals wins the day. There’s a tendency to spend on really expensive advertising and marketing materials to capture and keep customers. Unless you intend to be a national or global brand, small businesses can make do with the least expensive and often times more effective customer service programs.

Most enterprises (and I mean 60% of the enterprises existing today) will not grow to be national or global brands. You don’t need me for you to know this statistic. Just go to your local county or city and you will find out that a few businesses that register for their business permits will end up being a big brand five years after. What I am telling you is that “Customer Service” is not really exclusive for the big boys.

Customer Service is simply for enterprises or businesses who want to stay in the business of serving their customers. It doesn’t matter if it is a business with a 5,000 capitalization or a million dollars of capitalization, all businesses need customers and all customers want to be served in a manner they believe they deserve.

Think about this: All businesses have customers. The better they know them the better they can serve them. All businesses must understand how their products or services work or how it satisfies a customer's need.

Whether you’re an average guy or a genius, you will always end up adopting a process to make sure you deliver the product or service that satisfies your customer needs. Of course to deliver and consistently have the ability to deliver your products and services you need to have the right tools. You need technology and even the most mundane things like calculators and cash registers or a cheap communication tool like email.

Entrepreneurs or business owners may pride themselves on the ability to navigate around competition and the markets, but if you cannot afford risks it means you will have to plan. A business plan is important yet very few actually rely on a business plan to grow their business. Once you have confidence in your plan, you will need a team of very good people to run with the plan and make the business work.

Bottom line: Customer Service is not a complex or esoteric concept. It is just like any part of business made up of a manageable chunk of activities once organized can give you measurable and achievable results. I do believe that any business of whatever size will have to understand the six dimensions of customer service, namely: The Customer, The Service Concept, The Service Process, The Tools, The Business Plan, and The Team.

A Helpful Attitude Builds Relationships and More

2020-10-02T17:21:00.066+08:00

There are people who are very easy to ask for help or assistance from. They always go to great lengths to be of help to a brother, a parent, a cousin, a classmate, an office mate, or even a complete stranger. It comes naturally to these people.

My mother is the greatest influence in my life about being helpful. She showed me by her own conduct and attitude towards people how it is to be helpful.

It simply came very easily for her to decide to help someone. I have seen this a dozen times. I saw how she helped a man get his wife out of the hospital after giving birth to their child. The man said he had nobody else to run to. The hospital will not release his wife because of unpaid bills.

My mother took a pen and paper, wrote something, and then just sent the man off to wait for her in the hospital. It was our family driver who told me later on that she paid the hospital bills and just sent our driver to give the receipt to the man. She can't even remember the man after.

Another case was about two girls with really dark skin and very curly hair. They came one morning to ask for leftovers because their mother left them for about a week with no food. Their mother never came back.

I can't forget it because she did not give last night's leftovers. She asked them to sit around our garden table. She took my spaghetti (My Spaghetti) she prepared for my breakfast and served it to the two girls with hot chocolate. She just smiled and told me there's always a loaf of bread on the table for me.

These girls not only lost food, their mother just left them. Of course, I was ok with a loaf of bread. Actually, I just got two slices. My mother packed the loaf of bread and a bottle of peanut butter (my brother's favorite peanut butter) and gave it to the two girls.

It's cool. I can always get two slices of bread from the table...I know.

Being helpful is not something you get after a seminar. Knowing how to write a sales letter, maybe something you can get from a seminar. Building a website is something you can learn from a seminar. Baking a cake is something you get from a seminar. A helpful attitude is simply not a thing you pull out of a kit in a seminar. A helpful attitude has something to do with character.

I always like working with customer service, technical support, or even marketing people with an attitude of being helpful. It's always easy working with them even for long hours.

When you work for a company that provides maintenance service for large computer systems, you must be able to respond to a customer call any way you can. What if, the caller is not your customer?

A call coming in on a Friday one summer was made by someone asking help in trying to print a report in WordPerfect. I used to do a lot of writing in WordPerfect back then and then switch to PageMaker and then to Microsoft Word.

I was always the last to leave as usual. While everyone was rushing to the door to go home (it was already 5:00 PM), I was holding this phone listening to a desperate female voice.

I can't recall her name anymore but let's call her Beth. Beth called two of their suppliers who provided them their computers. She was told to call tomorrow morning because nobody is in technical support (Of course, it was already 5:00 PM.).

To get the help she called all the business names in the phone book under computers. Fortunately for her, there was only less than ten of us on the page. To make the long story short, I work for a company listed close to the end of the page of the phone book.

Receiving the call I immediately switch to our standard response protocols. Asking the identity of the caller and the company, verifying if they are currently enrolled in our service, and blah blah blah. She was not our customer and her company is not listed in our maintenance support program.

The usual response to this is to go into a prepared script. It was meant to get her interested in our maintenance services. I felt the desperation in her voice. I felt that she was not in the listening mode right then. I simply switched to my listening mode. I just let her talk about her predicament.

Beth called because her boss who is the Vice President of Finance for their company has prepared some financial data in QuattroPro and wants to integrate the spreadsheets in the report written in WordPerfect. At that time only WordPerfect can do this without any conversion being done with QuattroPro spreadsheets.

The report is supposed to be submitted and presented first thing in the morning. His boss is relying on her to finish the report that same night to give her boss time to review it before he goes home.

I walked her through the process of how to paste the spreadsheets in QuattroPro onto the WordPerfect document. There were so much data representing many tables to be pasted on the WordPerfect document. After she completed the task she requested that I stay on the line while his boss is reviewing the report she printed.

I told her that I will hang up and wait for her call. I promised her I won't go home until she tells me that the report is okay.

Of course, more requests came after I hang up, like how to create charts, how to paste the charts into WordPerfect, and how to insert charts into Harvard Graphics. At that time Harvard Graphics was a choice for presentations, not Microsoft PowerPoint. Eventually, Beth did finish the report that night.

I hang up and forgot about Beth and the call.

Several weeks after, my account executive comes to me and says: "Boss, remember that account we were trying to pursue for many months for our computer maintenance contract. Someone just called and requested the maintenance contract.

I haven't been approaching that client because the Vice President for Finance was giving us a hard time about our service fees. The Vice President said were higher than the other suppliers."

When I asked my account executive what brought about the sudden change of heart, he told me about the story of the Administrative Assistant working for the Vice President of Finance.

Apparently, our proposals like all the other proposals submitted to the company were all expensive. They were more or less of the same price levels. Finance has to decide on one eventually. The Vice President asked his Administrative Assistant which one she will choose.

She chose us!

The reason she gave was that somebody from the company helped her solve a technical problem even though she was not even a customer yet. Her logic was that if she can get help even if she's not a customer yet, how much more if she had a maintenance contract.

My account executive was thinking of sending her something to thank her but can't remember her name. I said, "Let me guess--Her name is Beth".

His eyes brightened and asked me how I knew?

I simply said, his "girl story" sounds like a Beth.

Technical Support is More Than Just Technical

2020-10-01T06:35:00.048+08:00

When you get that call from a customer about technical support, what comes to your mind? What conversation will be running in your head? Most of the time, what comes to your head are procedures, techniques, and the step-by-step processes of resolving a technical issue by the book. I know. I did most of these things all the time.

There is also a lesson I learned about responding to a customer call. The lesson is: Not all calls for technical support are actually technical.

There were two identically configured servers serving a company manufacturing slippers for export. One December day it just refuse to make identical copies of their database into each other's hard disk as it is supposed to. The call came in a few days before Christmas. I always get these calls a few days before Christmas.

The company cannot afford not to have their servers back up each other's database because they are supposed to shut down the servers on Christmas Day for maintenance. The backup ensures business continuity after the Christmas season. The main office in Japan will be cut off from their manufacturing plant completely without the servers.

The company adopts a "Just in Time" manufacturing scheme which makes real-time connection critical to the manufacturing division. Added to this is the fact that the new design of their system is just one of only three in the whole Asia region. This means it's been tried only three times. There are no precedents yet of a downed server under this design. There are no ready answers if these servers crash. There are no references. There are no manuals to help us out once a crisis unfolds.

Our customer's representative naturally is the Manager for Management Information Systems. She was the one who recommended the system, the service provider of the database management system, and of course the hardware (from us). She put her reputation on the line in putting the system in place, now it is about to fail not just her department and company but her personally.

The provider of the software and database system also arrived on the same day. They were the first to be informed of the problem. We were all in a huddle: the MIS team of the customer, software provider, and us the hardware provider.

We knew that if the system will not be up by Christmas, top management will be looking for answers and eventually someone who will provide the answers for the fiasco. We did not need to hear from her who that someone will be because she knows the bucks stop at her doorstep.

I pulled out every piece of information about our hardware including references to the same installation in other countries. It was functioning as it should. Our contacts from systems design and software development were not very sure if they can work around the software and the database.

There was no technical reference to find out what exactly was happening to the software but there was also no reference that the problem is supposed to happen. In this industry, if the problem did not happen yet, it will not be in the manual. The software provider has not encountered the technical problem themselves. We were in a situation where we had no answers.

I was no longer concerned about the technical issue, I was concerned about her, the MIS Manager who trusted us. We are about to fail her. Technically, we can always blame the software but it does not help our customer, the MIS Manager. She will still be responsible if the system crashes due to a faulty systems design. We have to give her confidence again not in the design or the system but confidence in us.

As soon as I got a chance to talk to our own Business Systems Manager who also is our most experienced systems engineer, I confirmed that there was no way to go around the problem based on the existing design. The system will not be online as long as we start up the system using the existing design.

The problem shifted from tweaking with the design to simply getting the system up by Christmas. My solution was to let the database management system run on a single server but to do that we have to roll in hardware with a lot higher configuration and possibly a server from a different brand because it was available.

This server will be available within 24-hours. The alternative was to get it via Hongkong or Singapore which will take weeks. We have only several days before Christmas.

I was now asking our Business Systems Manager to stick his head out together with mine. I was recommending a course of action out of the books and totally against our protocols. We were recommending a solution that was not in our procedure plus I was about to recommend a brand replacement which was against marketing policy. Of course, I got a call from our CEO himself a few hours after they got wind of what we were about to do.

The position I shared with my CEO was to choose between the protection of a brand or the retention of a customer. My boss of course responded by giving me the classic "chicken and egg" logic. If we lose the brand we have nothing to sell, if we lose the customer we have nobody to sell to.

My response was, I can always reposition the same brand with the customer but we can not reposition customers in the greater scheme of our marketing strategy once we have lost them. Besides, if we lose the confidence of our customers, especially this particular customer, it does not really matter what brand we carry. The customer will have nothing to do with us after this crisis.

We knew we could pull off technically the solution we had in mind, but we need also to act on our customer's fear. The fear of failure in the eyes of her superiors. The MIS Manager was up for more than 24 hours already.

We were also going to be up almost twenty hours if she does not go home and leave the factory. The lack of sleep was increasing her anxiety and stress. It was difficult talking to her. She had no breakfast when we met her that morning. It was a good thing we brought along food for her and her team.

Looking back this is what we did:

We did our homework - Research, research, research
We immediately formed a research team of two (2) people who will research both software and hardware issues of the problem using the most specific information we got about the design of the system.

Since we always have a profile of our customers right down to their favorite dessert, it was easy for us to know what will immediately cheer up our MIS Manager. Sweet food and in that very specific situation a bit of protein (burgers) and hot drink (coffee). Food can always calm people down.

Another thing I learned is that people are easier to talk to if they are munching burgers or doughnuts with steaming hot coffee. You think this is insignificant, try talking to someone who is hungry and without sleep for twenty-four hours about a problem she thinks you have caused. I have not read about this approach in any customer or sales manual but it always worked for me for many years.

Informed Top Management - Yours and Your Customer
After we have the facts straight from a direct interview of the customer and our research, we prepared a brief background of the issue, what we are currently doing to resolve the technical issue, and sent it via email to our superiors.

In the case of our customer, we have to ask the permission of the MIS Manager when to start informing her superiors, who will do the disclosure, how to deliver the information and how much detail to disclose. It has to be her call because she has a lot more at stake.

Our own CEO however was already advised of the pertinent perspectives of the issues in the event our customer's superior starts calling. The main objective was to keep things in perspective and to keep stakeholders calm since there is no crisis to speak of yet.

Get the Blessing of Top Management
We informed our superiors of what we intended to do. I had no choice. I was asking them to roll in an asset worth thousands of dollars just as a stand-in solution. It was not a sale. There were no margins to speak of. It was just a plain and simple first-aid solution to help a customer. Only the blessing of top management can get the wheels rolling towards resolving the issue. An expensive one at that.

Get Other Stakeholders in ASAP
Finding the right hardware specification was just one part of the solution. The other part is the software that runs the database. Although we can handle the technical aspect of the hardware design, we still need to talk to the software guys to make the whole system work.

We also need to talk to the MIS team of the customer to understand how the database is supposed to work for the company. All of them need to hear the plan because each of them has technical capabilities to execute different aspects of the plan.

Form a Unified Plan
Each team has a role to play but roles only work if it moves under a cohesive plan of action. You can learn how to come up with a great plan or you can learn it as you go but make one. Get all the stakeholders and put the plan together. More importantly, execute.

I said a lot of things that really only boils down to a simple thing: Not all technical issues call for technical solutions. What seems to be a technical issue may just require some form of human understanding and discernment and acting on them.

Why Do We Always Do The Basic Things Wrong?

2019-09-29T08:24:00.016+08:00

While helping do an inventory of computer accessories and electronic gadgets in a retailing outfit, I can't help but ask the people manning the store how they keep track of their customers.

Guess what? They don't!

They don't keep track of where they are getting their sales: What product and who buys them? The last time I was in retailing was in 1998 selling the very exact things but I carried more than 50 brands with the likes of Seagate, IBM, Hayes, Microsoft, Lotus, Creative Labs, Intel, AMD, and a lot more.

I can't believe that in 2008, retailers are still doing a lot of things wrong. Well not exactly wrong, but they don't do the most basic things at all (at least to get the sales consistently coming).

Back when I was managing retailing operations more than 50% of our sales were from more than 30% of our repeat customers. Customers who buy more than two items or have bought the second time will always end up in our database together with information about what hardware or software they already have at home and at the office (in this order).

Eliciting this "basic" information from customers has been integrated into the "script" of counter sales associates so that even if we don't get a sale we always have at least 5 to 10 new names in our database on that day.

Basic sales training will tell you that it is harder to get a new customer than encouraging repeat sales from an old customer but most retailing organizations ignore this. It is amazing. 9 out of 10 counter sales personnel will not initiate on their own a sales campaign for existing customers and more than half of retailing (especially small businesses) do not have such a campaign as a matter of policy.

If you want to test this, just walk into a computer store or even a hobby shop. You will most likely leave the store without the store clerk ever asking you about what you already have or how to get in touch with you about what you may need in the future.

Don't ask me if I tried it. I bought books, a new TV, a DVD player, a video game player, DVD rewritable discs, a headphone set, 2 pairs of shoes, a file box, a knapsack, a LED flashlight, binders, and more since January of this year and not a single salesperson or clerk ever ask me anything.

You don't really need much to get basic information from your customers. I designed a form that can be printed on letter-size paper (four forms on one side). The form keeps the information about the customer's full name, phone, email, address (if you're lucky because some are not just concerned about security they just find filling up forms tedious like me) or even mobile phone numbers.

To encourage them to give information, I usually tell them that they get to be invited to free seminars sponsored by our partners and on some special occasions I get to give them freebies from our partners.

I also created a Microsoft Excel template to compile all of this information so that later on I can easily integrate that into mail merge or even a fax campaign template.

If you really keep track after a year, you will be amazed at the pattern that will be seen after collating all the information including sales from each of your customers. You can even predict which week in a month they will most likely order again their supplies (I used to sell printer paper and ink).

I like to hear the expression "You called me just in time!" from customers every time my telemarketers make their daily calls.

In my next blog, I will show how a simple graph in Microsoft Excel helps me advise a friend not to close shop just because customer traffic is not consistent in their new store location in the same shopping mall.