Six key steps to working out customer service kinks

Author Maribeth Kuzmeski shares this anecdote to show that customer relationships are made or broken when something goes wrong:

While at a hotel, getting ready for a crucial business meeting, you turn on the hairdryer, but the power goes out. You call the service number and hear "Someone is on the way." After twenty minutes and two more calls, anxiety turns to anger, when a "service" person asks, "What do you want me to do about it?" Finally, the power comes back on, and a maintenance man explains it wasn't his fault and makes excuses about what went wrong internally. No one acknowledges or apologizes for your inconvenience.

Brian A Jackson | iStockphoto

“If a service recovery plan isn't understood by the entire staff, everything snowballs,” says Kuzmeski, author of ...And the Clients Went Wild! How Savvy Professionals Win All the Business They Want and The Connectors: How the World's Most Successful Businesspeople Build Relationships and Win Clients for Life. The hotel incident actually happened to one of her associates.

"If you don't have well-developed service recovery techniques in place, you'll lose the customer every time," she says. That leads to angry customers vowing never to return—and maybe decide to share their anger with countless others online.”

Kuzmeski offers these tips for service recovery:

1. Recognize and truly understand your customer's situation. Provide individual care. People with children have very different needs from busy businesspeople. Train your customer service people to recognize key differences and adjust responses accordingly.

2. Make sure what you're saying is happening is really happening. Customer service is more than following a script. "When the hotel guest made the second call, it's likely the front desk representative didn't check to see where the maintenance man was," says Kuzmeski. "Taking the time to locate him would have gotten the guest the service she needed."

3. Be specific about how the problem will be handled. Let the customer know what will happen and when. The more information customers have, the less anxious they feel.

4. Complaint number two is an emergency. Most people can forgive one mistake, if it’s addressed promptly. A second complaint calls for emergency mode. If you want to keep your customer, you must take care of the problem immediately.

5. Make sure the service philosophy permeates the business from top to bottom. The hotel in the anecdote is part of a chain with a rewards program for repeat customers. When the guest called to complain, the rewards people understood the inconvenience and tried to make it up to her by offering additional rewards points. "They hadn't properly trained their onsite staff,” Kuzmeski says. It’s crucial that everyone understand the customer service plan and be able to solve problems.

6. Don't assume customers will give you a second chance. If a customer takes the time to call you about a problem, you are lucky. You don't always get a chance to make it right. Often, customers just move on. And the real concern is that it takes only one dissatisfied customer to create a public relations disaster. Dissatisfied customers have created blogs and YouTube videos sharing their tales of bad service with the world.

Kuzmeski says customer loyalty is achievable, “but you have to have the service chops to take care of them. Make your customers and your relationships with them a priority—always! When you do so, you can create clients for life."

Hiking up recovery mountain

If your business, like so many others, is still hurting, you may wonder what the economists are thinking when they talk about our economy being in recovery.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession ran from December 2007 to June 2009. If we've been in recovery for a year and a half, why does it still feel like a "recession" to so many?

It's important to understand what economists mean when they speak of "recession." If you graph them, periods of growth, or expansion, are rising lines leading to peaks. Periods of contraction, or recession, are descending lines that lead to troughs.

The GDP, one of the main factors in measuring economic growth, has been rising since June 2009. Though that growth was sometimes small, the numbers were positive, as opposed to the negative numbers seen during the recession.

So why does recovery seem so crummy?

Photo by Christophe Libert
stock.xchng

Imagine you're climbing a mountain. When you reach the peak, you stand in the bright sunshine and can  see for miles.

Then you fall. You roll down that steep slope for a year and a half. You land in a valley. Bruised, but not broken, you stand up. That mountain behind you now blocks the sun. You're in shadow.

You can't go back the way you came. Ahead of you is another mountain -- maybe not as tall as the one you fell from. It has a shallower slope. You begin climbing. Slowly, surely, you ascend. You leave the valley floor behind. But the next peak is still far away, and you are still in shadow.

In The Great Reset, Richard Florida compares the 2007-2009 recession to earlier ones. "Recovery from both the Long Depression of the 1870s and the Great Depression of the 1930s -- the First and Second Resets -- took the better part of two or three decades."

He says forecasting where we'll be once the present crisis is history would be like predicting "the full flower of postwar suburbanization from the vantage point of Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration day in 1932."

Florida goes on to identify the forces "that will almost certainly power a real Great Reset and a more sustainable new way of life." I have yet to finish this book, but I suspect Florida's observations will be instructive for all of us as we climb through this long recovery.

And as we go, let's remember that we have a mighty counselor who climbs with us out of the valley. "The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned." — Isaiah 9:2

Disney center provides help for businesses

I attended a talk recently by Jerry Ross, executive director of the Disney Entrepreneur Center in Orlando. He said that just as businesses need to cut costs to deliver more profit to the bottom line, nonprofits need to reduce costs to deliver more services. That’s what the participants in the DEC have done.

By sharing overhead costs and support staff, the organizations that make up the DEC are able to do more for their clients. That also makes the DEC your one-stop shop for a variety of business help:

• Bookkeeping
• Business planning
• Certification
• Finding capital
• Insurance
• Marketing

Service providers based at the DEC include the Hispanic Business Initiative Fund, Central Florida Urban League, National Association of Women Business Owners, Service Corps of Retired Executives. The University of Central Florida is a major partner, offering its business incubation program and the Small Business Development Center. Orange County Government and the U.S. Department of Commerce are also participants.

The DEC hosts a variety of low-cost seminars, as well as one-on-one counseling and networking opportunities. Take a look at the calendar to find events that meet your needs. Services are available for all sorts of businesses, not just small startups.

The DEC is presently located at One Landmark Center in downtown Orlando, but will be moving in April to Fashion Square Mall. Ross expects the center will have a grand opening event in May. He said the reason for the move is primarily to reduce costs. An added benefit for the center’s clients -- who are also trying to cut costs -- will be free parking.

Have a purposeful new year

As you take stock of last year and face the new year, what do you hope to accomplish? And how do you plan to get there? Because we all need a plan.

If you missed the On-Purpose Leadership Experience last fall, please take the opportunity to join Kevin McCarthy for a free webcast preview of the January edition. This program is sponsored by our chamber.

I attended last fall, and it was a real eye-opener. Kevin's On-Purpose method helped me build a framework to figure out what to do -- and what to stop doing. Articulating my purpose helped me see what parts of my life fit and which don't. it helped me focus on which goals are really important, and which ones I can set aside for awhile.

No matter how good or how challenging your life has been lately, don't go another year without really knowing who you are, who you can become, and how to get there.

Register online for the preview, and prepare to enter the new year with purpose.

Mark & Brodie's Christmas Message

To reach younger consumers, think globally

I had to go to Germany to get the right watchband. What strikes me as odd is not that I paid twenty euros for a watchband, but that I could only find one store that had the size, color, and material I wanted. That the store was in Germany was almost -- but not entirely -- irrelevant. There was the price of shipping and the exchange rate to think about.

Other than that, once I found a website with a product that met my admittedly picky specifications, I placed my order, logged into PayPal, and sent my funds off to Uhrenbandversand in Oranienburg. In a little over a week, I received my package by luftpost.

Pollster John Zogby places me and my contemporaries in an age cohort he calls “Nikes,” because our motto, he says, is “just do it.” This is the group also known as “Generation X,” that hard-to-pin-down bunch that followed the baby boomers. After us comes what Zogby calls the “First Globals,” those born 1979–90. Even more than I, with my euro-spending ways, First Globals see a world without borders.

Understanding First Globals is necessary for marketing to them, and in his book The Way We’ll Be, Zogby details their worldview. Regarding the Kyoto accords, the International Criminal Court and the role of the United Nations, he says, their position is “sharply at odds with the generations just ahead of them.”

To get them to listen to whatever you’re selling, you have to get down to where they are. You have to make yourself equally a citizen of planet Earth, and you need to recognize that, for them, embracing diversity isn’t a matter of political correctness but a habit of mind.

The Way We’ll Be is packed with demographic information not only about different generations but about different mindsets. Zogby describes the major movements in our culture: living with limits, embracing diversity, looking inward, and demanding authenticity. This book is an excellent resource for understanding these movements, which will be key to reaching whatever demographic is your target market.

To reach First Globals, Zogby says you must stretch your borders. Though their worldview may differ from yours, you can successfully reach them by “opening doors, not closing them.”

If you stretch the borders of your business far enough, you might even make customers of First Globals in Germany.

And a little child shall lead the gadget design market

One of my favorite verses is Proverbs 21:5--“The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.” It’s a reminder that accomplishing business goals takes time, planning, and hard work.

Photo of dzdock One by dzlabs

This ingenious gadget, designed by an 11-year-old, is evidence of what such diligence can lead to. Dino Zaharakis noticed that many iPad and iPhone holders don’t accommodate devices in a case or with the cord attached. He also noticed that although many products are designed in the USA, few are made here.

Instead of just bemoaning the trade deficit, Zaharakis applied himself to designing a "one for all” gadget stand. His design is a wonder of simplicity. Then his dad helped bring this idea into reality.

The Zaharakis family lives the not-so-fondly named “rust belt.” They chose local companies to manufacture the final product. As the dzdock website says, “American-made. American-designed. Yes, we can still do it!”

In applying diligence to bring his concept to fruition, Dino Zaharakis reminds me of another great verse: 1 Timothy 4:12--“Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example…”

Do you have a product manufactured locally? Tell us your story.