customer service is like making love. I know that sounds farfetched, but bear with me here: It takes only a minute—or two—to get the general concept, but you can gainfully invest a lifetime in mastering the details. (And you’ll never get the full picture if you only practice when you’re by yourself.)
Mastering the fine points of customer service is a never-ending challenge in part because customer expectations and desires change all the time. In fact, they’re different now from the last time you spoke with your customer—in this case, a frequent customer of yours I’ll call Lorena Willis.
A bit after 10:30 on a wintry morning, one of your contact center operators answers an incoming from Lorena. Thanks to your processes, techniques, and support software, your operator, Pam Chang, has good historical data on Lorena, including what she bought from you last year (a built-in microwave and a set of professional ceramic knives) and general preferences, such as her preferred mode of shipping.
But there’s a hitch: You actually don’t know Lorena Willis anymore.
Like all of us, she’s changed. She’s changed since the recession. Since the internet became what seems like a 25/8 proposition. Since the explosion in popularity of mobile devices.
In what ways has Lorena likely changed? Let’s take a tour through the dominant themes emerging in the marketplace—keeping our eyes trained on those that illuminate the ways your customer service may need updating.
Before I become a master of all generalizations, I’m going to concede something rarely admitted in a trendspotting chapter like this one: The most important factors that have changed about Lorena, or any customer, are individual changes. Is she richer? Poorer? Recently single or newly married? Does she have a new pet or is she grieving for one that has died? No matter how big you grow, or want to grow, as a company, individual customers buy from you, not assemblages of customers, not slices of a market. Learning to treat individual customers as individuals, honoring individual preferences unique to that customer, is a key to business success. But being aware of underlying trends in the marketplace is also essential for the success of any business that relies on significant numbers of transactions and on forward-looking planning.
My battery died recently on my aging Volvo, and with it I lost the stations that had been preset into my car radio. Afterwards, driving around manually selecting the stations I generally listen to (more or less just one station), I found myself irritated to have to dig up the long-forgotten instructions on how to set a radio station into memory. After a few days, I found myself thinking, “Doesn’t my car know I want this station as a preset? I mean, I listen to it every day—the Volvo should be inviting me to add it to a ‘favorites list’ or some such.”
But my car was manufactured in 2004, and, of course, cars didn’t “think” that way in 2004. And neither did consumers. Believe me, customers think that way now: They expect devices—and companies—to, in effect, say, “Mr. Solomon, I note that you’ve been listening quite a bit to your local NPR station. Care to have me memorize it for you so you’ll not have to fumble for it while you’re negotiating a difficult turn?”
Customers now expect personalized, anticipatory technological behavior and aggregated information—instantly. To get a sense of how profoundly customer expectations have changed, look around. With the advent of mobile computing, a traveler can get the answers on her iDroidPhoneBerry® that the concierge or bellman or neighborhood know-it-all used to parcel out at his own rate and with varying amounts of reliability: What’s a good Italian restaurant within walking distance? What subway line do I take to Dupont Circle, and which exit is best from the station? My plane just landed—in this country, do I shake hands when I meet someone of the opposite gender?
While this bears some resemblance to the model in place only a few years ago—settling into a hotel room, pulling out a laptop, fumbling around for an Ethernet cable, trying to figure out how to log on to the hotel’s network—there are real differences. Specifically, the better consolidation of information. Surfing the net—going out on a net-spedition to look for stuff seems like too much work and too big a time investment for today’s customers. Today, customers expect technology to bring an experience that is easier, more instantaneous, and more intuitive. Customers want to type or thumb a few keystrokes and have the information they need served up for them concierge-style based on their IP address or satellite location and other useful clues. Consider Hipmunk—which lists travel options along with warnings about long layovers and other agonies, and shows hotels with precise proximity to your actual destination. And GogoBot, where your own Facebook/Twitter pals have already rated potential trips for you. And of course TripAdvisor, with its user-generated ratings of nearly everything in the world of travel.
A study by Accenture showed a manifestation of this trend: Customers in a retail situation often prefer to look to a smartphone for answers to simple product questions rather than working with a human clerk.1 The smartphone answers just seem to be faster and more accurate and sometimes, sad to say, come with a little less attitude. (We’ll work on this attitude part when we get to building your culture and to hiring.)
Of course, the timeline of customer expectations in general has sped up radically. In addition to mobile computing and improved connectivity, Amazon.com is one of the key factors in this—making the level of what’s in stock and available overnight absolutely unprecedented. Within minutes of placing your order, it’s likely being slapped with a shipping label at one of the Amazon.com-owned or UPS-Amazon.com-partnered warehouses in one of many strategically located places in the country.2 (And overnight fulfillment, of course, is only the beginning. YouSendIt, for example, a rapidly growing service that allows you to send enormous files nearly instantly, sticks it to the FedExes of the world with its slogan: “Overnight? Are you kidding?”)
“Shame shift” is a term I learned from Jay Coldren, Marriott International’s vice president of lifestyle brands. It’s a trend that’s become a significant part of today’s consumer psyche.
Before the economic downturn, the pride of being able to consume in a conspicuous manner—sitting in front of a many-inch flat screen, taking the family on a summer vacation to a center of tropical opulence—was considered appropriate and enjoyable by economically comfortable customers.
Now this same behavior may be seen as crass, even rude. The attitude has shifted from pride in showing off how much we can afford to shyness about consuming too conspicuously. But—and as Pee Wee Herman would’ve said, it’s a “big but”—there’s a huge exception.
“What we’re seeing now is consumption being excused by ‘attached meaning,’” as Jay puts it.
What is “attached meaning”? Think of the people you know who willingly pay five bucks for a cup of coffee, provided the coffeeshop gives part of that fiver to help the rainforest. This phenomenon is significant. A study of consumer habits confirms that shoppers are becoming “more deliberate and purposeful” in their purchasing decisions.3 “Conspicuous consumption has given way to more conscious or practical consumerism” and “rampant deal-seeking is being replaced by more purchase selectivity.”
Another study shows that 87 percent of consumers in the United States believe that companies should value the interests of society at least as much as strict business interests.4 Customers are demanding more alignment of company values with their own, and this customer sentiment is being expressed in buying choices. John Gerzema, chief insights officer at Young & Rubicam, told Inc. magazine editor at large Leigh Buchanan that, according to his vast database of consumer attitudes, 71 percent of people agree with the statement, “I make it a point to buy brands from companies whose values are similar to my own.”5
One of the notable characteristics people seek in their purchases today is “timelessness”—a desire that has emerged from the recession at full tilt.
“When you consider layoffs, downsizing, delayed raises, and reduced hours, more than half of all American workers have suffered losses,” Young & Rubicam’s Gerzema notes.6 “This very real pain has driven us to reconsider our definition of the good life. People are finding happiness in old-fashioned virtues.”
Examples are everywhere: Urban and suburban women flouting zoning regulations to raise their own hens in their side yards; the practice of “cow-pooling” (where several families join forces to share in the purchase of a cow); or the surge in popularity of Hunter boots, the boots that the Queen of England wears when she walks her corgis: This footwear classic combines authentic story and excellent product and, as a result, has caught fire. Customers are looking for old standbys that can become hip again. A backstory—history—has become important to the consumer. “People are looking for things that are authentic,” says interior designer and web phenomenon Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan (apartmenttherapy.com). The drive for authenticity, according to Gillingham-Ryan, “will resonate with people as long as we live in these times.”7
But we are living in these times, so don’t be fooled into thinking your customers will accept timelessness without timeliness. They want the twenty-first-century version of timelessness—on a timetable that matches the impatient standards of the digital generation. Inconvenienced in any way, they’ll usually lose interest. For example, Restoration Hardware is perfectly positioned for the timelessness trend—but it still needs to have an iPad app and be able to deliver overnight to the farthest reaches of its customer base. A Twinings Tea slogan nails the ideal, uh, blend we’re looking for here: “Your 15-minute break, 300 years in the making.”
Customers feel newly empowered in their relationships with companies. They’re expecting businesses to respect that sense of empowerment—and they lash out at those that don’t. They expect that your company will make itself easy to contact and will respond to customer comments at a high and thoughtful level. Which I suggest you do. Because feedback will be offered, whether you welcome it or not. It used to be that a peeved customer might drop by your shop and give the manager an earful. Or go through an extended search to figure out the correct address for an executive high enough to make a difference, and then sit down and write an angry letter. Later, the internet brought an increased sense of empowerment, with online comment forms and the ability to send instantaneous complaint emails.
Today, those methods are looking slow and outdated. Technology has created faster, more viral ways for consumers to make their annoyance felt. Exhibit “A” here, of course, is Twitter: Anyone who has enough people reading his tweets can get a company’s attention in a hurry with a cleverly or powerfully worded complaint, either within Twitter’s 140 characters or via a shared link directing followers to a longer post elsewhere on the web. Not only that, but the people who see it may resend it to their own Twitter followers (retweet it). Before long, one person’s complaint will reach enough people and elicit enough similar responses to make the company wake up and pay attention to the message of the original complainer.
Customers understand that this is empowerment at the speed of light. And they expect you to understand it too, to incorporate the empowerment expectations of customers into your problem-resolution process. In other words, understand that the playing field has flattened—or prepare to be flattened yourself. (Much more on this when we get to social media, in Chapters 11, 12, and 13.)
While the strength of the green trend will ebb and flow with time and varies in strength from customer to customer, it’s a clear underlying sentiment among much of today’s buying populace. And the younger the customer, the more “hooked on green”—so there’s no reason to think this trend will abate as the buying power of younger consumers increases. In interacting with your customers, it’s always wise to operate from the assumption that they’ll have concerns relating to the environmental impact of your operation and their purchase. Those unconcerned with the environment will rarely be offended if you take environmental precautions, but those who are environmentally concerned will be upset by, for example, your business’s excessive packaging, whether or not they do the favor of letting you know of their disappointment.
Awareness of environmental sensitivity should become part of the day-to-day thinking you put into customer service interactions. For instance, perhaps a particular customer who purchased a large item from you that arrived in less than perfect shape would prefer a discount rather than having a pickup and rerun of the order—because of his concern about the carbon impact of the return shipping. Or maybe your offer to throw in an additional, but not entirely needed, product as compensation for a delay will only grate rather than be appreciated.
Self-service, which includes everything from web-based e-commerce to IVR (interactive voice response telephone systems) to concierge-like self-help touch-screen menus in public spaces to passengers printing their own boarding passes at home before traveling, is a powerful trend in customer service, and companies that ignore it, pursue it reluctantly, or violate the basic laws of its implementation will be left in the dust. There are various factors driving the self-service trend: our round-the-clock lifestyle, a buying populace that is increasingly tech savvy, even in some cases the higher comfort level of socially anxious customers when doing business with machines rather than face to face or even on the phone. (The rules of doing self-service correctly are explored in depth in Chapter 8. Disregard them at your own peril.)
Yeow. How can you keep your knowledge up to date to meet the changing needs of your customer? Especially when every business’s customers are different from every other business’s—and the best a chapter like this can do for you is to paint things in broad strokes?
The answer: ask. Once you’ve built true customer intimacy, as we’ll spend much of this book together doing, you’ll have the ultimate foot-hold into the future. Truly loyal customers earnestly want to share with you how their needs and wishes are changing. And how they want you to change with—and for—them.
Now, I don’t mean “ask” as a pat answer. Keeping tabs on and understanding your customers is difficult, exhausting, literally endless, and often confusing. Think of the man in the New Yorker cartoon telling his companion while scanning the wine list, “I want Chardonnay, but I like saying ‘Pinot Grigio.’” If customers willingly will buy what they don’t “want” (and believe me, they do it all the time) due to some psychological drive—to impress, to try something new, for nostalgia, or even to roll particular French words like “Pinot Grigio” around on their tongues—how can you ever know on any kind of immutable basis what they really are seeking from you?
You can’t really: There’s no “set and forget” in customer intimacy, and that’s a humbling thought. But it’s also the basis of how you win the customer service game—by always asking. Always valuing empathy. Never trusting that your assessments from yesterday are sufficient for today. So, you’ll have a couple of restless, even sleepless, nights keeping up. Do it well enough and your future restless nights can be in Bali, or Fenway Park … or wherever you choose.
You may think you know your customer, but in a sense you don’t—because your customer’s needs are constantly changing. The most important changes are individual (idiosyncratic to one particular customer), but it also helps to keep your eye on six trends affecting customer service:
1. Don’t make your customers search for information; bring it to them—and right away. Customers today expect technology that brings an experience that is easy, instantaneous, and intuitive.
2. Conspicuous consumption is becoming acceptable only when excused by “attached meaning,” leading to greater purchase selectivity. Shoppers are also demanding more alignment between a company’s values and their own, believing that companies should value the interests of society as much as or more than strict business interests.
3. Customers value timelessness over trendiness: products that have a backstory. Yet don’t be fooled into thinking your customers will accept timelessness without timeliness: You need to keep up with the technological times and with modern pacing.
4. Customers are feeling empowered in their relationships with companies. They expect businesses to support this sense of empowerment—and they lash out at those that don’t.
5. In interacting with your customers, it’s wise to operate from the assumption that they’ll have concerns relating to the environmental impact of your operation.
6. Self-service is a giant trend, and companies that ignore it, pursue it reluctantly, or violate its basic laws will be left in the dust.
How can you keep up your knowledge of the ever-changing needs of your customer? Ask.