The No-BS Formula for Customer Service That Doubles as Marketing
Fellow marketing professionals, I have a quiz for you: What
costs US companies $62 billion annually and fuels 99.9% of the angry,
misspelled tweets you hate answering?
If you replied with "poor
customer service," you win.
Digital technology was supposed
to make customer service fast and seamless. Instead, it made service slow,
impersonal, and dissatisfying. Still, by ensuring that you retain more
customers than your competitors, your customer service can double as marketing.
First, let's better understand
the problem.
Infinite
Ways to Fail
There are
endless ways to scare away a customer, but limited ways to keep one. Today,
without much effort, you could make 20, 2,000, or 2 million of your customers
disappear; it's much more likely, though, that you're losing customers one
conversation at a time.
In the tech industry especially,
people don't contact Customer Service because they're abounding in joy.
Interactions usually begin with a frustrated, distressed, and stymied customer.
When service leaders talk about "delighting" customers, I call BS—unless
they plan to give away product.
More realistically, you're
dealing with a human powder keg and trying to prevent it from igniting.
Sometimes, people pre-ignite on social media, and there's nothing you can do
other than damage control.
Modern conceptions of customer service are naïve and deny the
inherent unpleasantness of solving a problem neither you nor the customer
wanted; let's reframe the concept with a dose of reality.
Redefining
the Craft of Service
Online and over the phone, a customer service interaction is an
unwanted, unexpected dialog that occurs on a spectrum from severely
disappointing to pretty good. Exceptions occur when a company does something
unwarranted and extremely generous.
So, the goal is to retain
frustrated customers because acquiring new customers can be 5-25 times more costly.
To achieve high retention levels, we need to name the challenges
of remote service.
1.
Time Inequality
When you imagine a service
interaction in a department store, it probably illustrates time equality. You find
a store staffer in a few seconds. Together, you return an ill-fitting shirt,
make an exchange, or solve whatever other problem you may have. You both expend
equal amounts of time.
Time inequality occurs when one
party—the company's rep or the customer—spends more time on the problem than
the other. In a good service interaction, the rep expends more time than the
customer. Unfortunately, the opposite tends to happen online.
Let's say a customer spends 35 minutes reading knowledge base
and forum articles in attempts at DIY troubleshooting. After finding no
solution, she then spends another five minutes navigating a robotic call tree,
then 10 minutes waiting on hold (all the while being told her call is very
important and to remain on the line), and finally 10 minutes on the phone with
a rep. That's an hour lost. Notice that your rep spent one-sixth of that time dealing
with the problem.
Time inequality angers customers because they feel they've taken
the brunt of a problem they didn't cause—all to save your company money.
Maybe that approach brings down the monthly cost of their
subscription, but good luck making that case to an angry user.
2.
Narrative Accumulation
Think of each service engagement as a story—not the kind people
would ever want to hear... but, still, the kind that has characters, conflicts,
a beginning, middle, and end, etc. There's an accumulation of narrative until
there's a resolution.
In the physical world, the narratives accumulate in
relationships. My car's "check engine" light switches on, so I visit
the mechanic. He services the car and documents the repair work he completed. I
pay for the service. If the "check engine" light comes back on, this
mechanic and I have an established relationship; we each have a memory and
documentation of what occurred, which enables us to take the next step without
rehashing the narrative.
Narrative accumulation is less common with remote service. If my
laptop breaks down and I call support, the rep will ask questions and try to
solve the problem. If the problem persists and I call back, generally I must
re-navigate the call tree, answer all the same questions, describe the problem
and solutions we attempted, and then continue the narrative. If my warranty has
expired, some companies will charge me $45 for the privilege of speaking to a
rep: If they're trying to improve my warm and fuzzy feelings toward the company,
that won't do it.
Narrative accumulation suffers online because, unlike the
mechanic, the tech company has a multitude of reps in unknown locations who
don't have a memory of what occurred or a record documenting it.
The lack of narrative accumulation drives customers nuts. It
also contributes to time inequality by forcing customers to repeat stories in
which they don't want to be a character in the first place.
3.
Service Relativity
We established that the best a service interaction can be is
"pretty good"—unless you give out free stuff or do something
outrageously kind. Costco, for example, raised the bar by refunding the cost of
a Christmas Tree that was returned because it died—in mid-January!
But how does a person distinguish "pretty good" from
the spectrum of other experiences? By comparison.
Let's say you buy shoes from an e-commerce site, and they don't
fit. You want to exchange them for the proper size. The timer has begun, the
narrative is accumulating, and you somehow connect with Customer Service to
make the exchange.
As you go through the experience, you'll make comparisons and
imagine counterfactuals. Would it have been easier to buy shoes at a local
store versus online? Had I ordered from Zappos, Amazon, or another popular shoe
retailer, would the exchange have been quicker? Is this exchange free, or am
paying for shipping? Can I trigger the exchange online, or must I call someone?
The shoe exchange prompts
comparison with other shoe sellers—not with banks, health insurers, or other
unrelated businesses. If you have a bad experience with a local business, you
may have some alternatives depending on where you live. If you have a bad
experience online, you have manyalternatives no more or less
accessible than the company that failed you.
Back in 2010, one survey found that 82% of consumers had stopped
doing business with a company because of bad service. That means they had and
pursued alternatives (or didn't need what the company offered, after all).
Your company is interchangeable because barriers to change are
no longer insurmountable; they're just a mouse click.
A
Winning Formula
A company that offers better time inequality and narrative
accumulation relative to its competitors creates better impressions, retains
more customers, and therefore has an edge in marketing. The edge may come in
the form of word-of-mouth, lowered acquisition costs, reputation, and other
benefits that are harder to measure.
Naturally, you might ask, "What's the winning formula? How
do I improve time inequality or narrative accumulation?"
Some of it's not rocket science. Invest in a good knowledge
base. Automate common service requests. Use a record-keeping system and
protocol for service interactions so that anyone can pick up the narrative.
However, I'd be remiss if I just tossed out googleable ideas
knowing next to nothing about your company, its competitors, and the modes of
service you rely on. How many "do-this" tips that you find on the
Internet pan out for you? Most lack context, and most probably aren't backed by
real experiences.
The "formula" lies hidden in your service data, in
interviews with customers, in your competitor's social feeds, and in other
places where you can find clues to the puzzle.
The concepts of time inequality, narrative accumulation, and
service relativity apply to any industry. If you set out to optimize those
variables, you'll find the means.
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