By Patricia B. Seybold

Has your company moved from enabling customer self service to empowering customers?
Notice these customer empowerment trends. How many of them are in play in your organization?

1. We are investing in providing better self-service tools:
• across the customer’s lifecycle (plan, explore, learn, evaluate, decide, buy, learn, use, improve, enhance, replenish/renew/update, or replace)
• across interaction channels/touchpoints (Web, email, phone, PDA, point of sale)
• across direct and indirect sales, distribution, fulfillment and service personnel, and ecosystem partners

2. We are investing resources and time in improving search, navigation, findability, and content quality for our customer-touching Web sites and portals, as well as our knowledgebases, online product catalogs, and e-tools and resources in all the languages with which our customers and partners interact with us.

3. We are developing “smarter” products–products and services that can gather data, provide feedback, monitor their own performance and report their status and usage; products and services that “know” who owns them, and what support, update or subscription services they’re entitled to receive; products and services with which customers interact directly; products and services that “phone home,” to provide and receive updates.

4. We’re converging our previously silo’d and specialized customer support organizations into “single point of contact” cross-functional customer support organizations. We are combining support for business issues (quotes, orders, contracts, credit approval, financing, licenses, maintenance agreements) with our support for usability or technical issues (is this the right solution for my needs, will this solve my problem, will this work with/go with what I already own, what are the possible downsides, e.g., tax consequences, hidden costs? How do I use this to do X? Why isn’t this working? Did I do something wrong? Can you help? How can I improve my performance/utilization? How can I reap greater benefits?)

5. We’re building out and nurturing customer communities–communities of customers who share a common context and common outcomes, customers who are willing to engage with us and to help each other.

I see these five trends as the building blocks for an integrated customer empowerment strategy.
If you’re engaging in one or more of these activities, you’re moving away from customer support and customer self-service to empowering customers and empowering your employees to empower customers.

You’re investing in giving customers the tools they need to help themselves and one another, to find what they need, to get things done, and to improve their performance. You’re realigning your organizations to empower customers to help them achieve their desired outcomes.

THINK CUSTOMER EMPOWERMENT; NOT CUSTOMER SERVICE

(http://outsideinnovation.blogs.com/pseybold/2006/11/think_customer_.html), by Patricia B. Seybold, November 22, 2006, Copyright 2006-2008, The Patricia Seybold Group, Inc.

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By Patrick Galvin

We live in the ‘”Age of the Empowered Consumer.’” Those companies that realize this will rise. Those who fail to grasp this new reality will fall.

When I studied marketing in the early 1990s, a professor said that a disgruntled consumer shares a negative buying experience with ten times as many people as a positive one. Today, upset customers can share their anger with the world.

Late in the evening of November 2001, two men arrived at a Doubletree Club Hotel in Houston, Texas where they had arranged guaranteed reservations. They were chagrined to discover that the rooms had long since been assigned, and they were miffed at finding themselves confronted with a desk clerk who was decidedly unapologetic about the mix-up, unsympathetic to their plight, and unhelpful at making alternate arrangements.

To express their displeasure, the two men used Microsoft’s PowerPoint software to prepare a humorous graphic complaint entitled “Yours is a Very Bad Hotel.” They sent the presentation to the hotel manager, two friends, and one of their mothers-in-law. That was it. On the last PowerPoint screen, they encouraged the recipients to spread the word.

Within a few months, the PowerPoint presentation was forwarded millions of times around the world and got prominent coverage in publications such as The Wall Street Journal and Forbes. Imagine what this negative exposure cost the Doubletree in terms of its reputation and lost reservations.

Now, it’s even easier for people to express frustration with a product or service that doesn’t meet their expectations. For reviews of just about any kind of service provider, from insurance agents to clowns who perform at birthday parties, check out Angie’s List.  Members of Angie’s List have access to a database of opinions that are posted by other members, who number 250,000 nationwide. The reviews follow a standard format that looks like a school report card. Contractors, for instance, are graded by parameters including workmanship, punctuality and friendliness. And there is a comment section where you can learn that while Bob is a terrific plumber, he’s colorblind – so don’t let him advise you on what to paint the bathroom.

Angie’s List is just one of many sites aimed at soliciting consumer reviews. Others with a national presence include the Better Business Bureau, Craigslist, City Search, Trip Advisor, and Epinions. In addition, many cities have local websites that give consumers a place to vent.

An irate consumer can also write about a negative experience with your company on a blog. According to Technorati, the largest blog search engine, there are now 29.3 million blogs and many contain entries about poor products and service.

Truly tweaked and technologically-savvy consumers can easily develop a website to communicate their displeasure to the world. Some good examples of this can be found at websites lodging complaints against Walmart, Home Depot, and PayPal.

While it might be tempting to ignore customer complaints when you have concerns that seem more pressing, your failure to assuage the complainer and to prevent similar incidents from occurring might cause the next “Yours Is A Very Bad Business” message to go around the world.

By taking good care of your customers, you are not only doing the right thing but also ensuring that your business will grow through positive word-of-mouth.

Patrick Galvin is “Chief Galvanizer’’ at Galvin Communications, a word-of-mouth marketing and PR firm in Portland, Oregon. http://www.galvincomm.com

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By Robert L Moment

Customers of every kind of business imaginable these days bemoan the state of customer service. While the global economy and the Internet have given businesses the opportunity to serve more clients than ever before, the trend has also given way to impersonal, lackluster customer service. It’s unfortunate that most businesses today don’t realize that they will regularly lose valuable customers if they don’t focus on providing an exceptional customer service experience.

In most businesses, once a customer begins dealing with the customer service department, he or she is already in a negative mindset. The best customer service representatives aren’t those that simply neutralize the problem. Outstanding customer service representatives take a negative and turn it into a positive that ensures the customer is not only happy, but is convinced he or she has had an outstanding experience – the Wow Factor – that he would not have gotten with any other company.

The key ingredients of the Wow experience are:

• Seamless Service
• Trustworthy Service
• Attentiveness
• Resourcefulness
• Courtesy
• Pro-active Service

Seamless Service means providing everything the customer needs, not just what is required to meet the minimum standards. It’s about making sure that they don’t have to wait and wonder. Customers will appreciate a smooth, seamless process for addressing their needs. If there are several steps needed to take care of their concerns, keep them in the loop – update them by e-mail or with a quick phone call so that they know you are working on the situation and progress is being made. By keeping them abreast of what is going on, you are letting them know you haven’t forgotten about them and that you understand their concerns – reassurance and communication are powerful customer service tools.

Trustworthy Service is essential to retaining customers. Promising a customer anything and delivering nothing is the surest way to not only lose a customer, but get the kind of “word of mouth” bad press that can ruin you. Under promise and over deliver – If you promise a satisfactory solution and then go the extra mile to not only satisfy the customer, but gain their appreciation and “Wow” them, you will get word of mouth that will bring new customers to you.

Attentive Service means paying attention during and after the initial contact. How many times have you contacted customer service and been subjected to an obviously scripted response from the customer service representative? Does it give you the feeling they aren’t really listening, but just trying to get to the end of their canned presentation?

Attentiveness should run through every customer service experience, from listening carefully to the customer’s concerns to following up after the exchange is over to make sure their needs have been met. Listening isn’t just about hearing – it is about understanding what is really being said. The words are just the beginning –what about the customer’s tone of voice? Her mood? Is she disappointed, angry or frustrated? Keying in to the customer’s mood and responding appropriately is essential, and it means not following a script.

Resourcefulness means finding solutions when there appear to be none. Many companies have iron-clad policies that must be followed whenever a problem arises; however, sometimes a customer won’t be satisfied by the “company line” approach. Resourceful customer service representatives know that there is always a way to move beyond the standard procedures in order to make a customer happy. Resourcefulness involves finding a solution when a solution isn’t apparent. This may mean moving up the chain of command before the customer demands to talk to your superior. Companies with excellent customer service also give their representatives some leeway so that they can come up with creative solutions on their own. When a customer senses that you are going beyond the norm to help them, they will feel valued and respected.

Courtesy is a commodity that is becoming rarer every day. It takes so little to be polite but it is becoming a lost art. Say please when you ask a customer a question, thank them for their information and take your time talking to them. Nothing makes a customer feel more devalued than being treated like a number. Use the person’s name, make requests rather than demands and know when to apologize. When something goes wrong for a customer, they want to hear that you understand their frustration and that you are genuinely sorry that they are being inconvenienced. It takes nothing to say, “I’m so sorry you aren’t satisfied and I hope we can do something to correct this.”

Pro-Active Service means not waiting for the customer to come up with a solution that you simply follow through on. A pro-active customer service representative anticipates the needs of the customer and follows through. Don’t wait for the customer to ask you what you are willing to do – anticipate the question and answer it before they can ask. If they call and say they aren’t satisfied, apologize and immediately suggest some solutions. Customers want you to take the lead – acknowledge their unhappiness, offer a solution or solutions and explain to them how you are going to follow through. Pro-Active service means taking the lead, which will reassure your customers that you know what you are doing and that you will follow through.

If you keep these six keys in mind – seamless service, trustworthiness, attentiveness, resourcefulness, courtesy and pro-active service – you will be able to offer every customer the Wow Customer Service Experience that inspires loyalty and keeps customers coming back for more.

Robert Moment is an innovative customer service consultant, business coach and author of “Invisible Profits: The Power of Exceptional Customer Service”.

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