Carson Research Consulting: Are you satisfied?

It’s a no-brainer, don’t you think? That a company should try just a little harder to make their customers feel special? And I don’t mean “flowers and candy” special, just a little something thoughtful. The kind of every day little things partners do for each other (if they have a successful partnership).

As you may have noticed, the CRC website was hacked earlier this week. We had it back up and running within a couple of hours. Our website technician explained that the hackers had added popular keywords (mostly related to sex and prescription medicines) and then directed bots to keep hitting the site. It was a purely destructive act designed to shut down the site. What happens is, the site gets overloaded, and Network Solutions servers notice this overload, and shut the site down.

How nice would it have been if Network Solutions had a mechanism to alert me to this activity. Just a phone call or email (a phone call may be preferred, since host site shenanigans are involved) to say “hey, something is going on with your website that looks unusual”. I could check it out, and fix it quickly.

Little things mean a lot. I used to have two large German Shepherds, and although both were well-trained enough to allow people into the house to repair things, they looked very intimidating. When George, from CooperHVAC, would come to my house to work on the air conditioning, he often came right after his lunch. He would get an extra large french fry order and save some for the dogs. Of course, I continue to use Cooper because he did great work, but his thoughtfulness towards the two beasts made me feel especially loyal.

What little things could you be doing for your customers? Is there some contact, some bit of information, or some other little tidbit that you could give them that would make them feel valued?

A colleague of mine recently had a problem with her new Toshiba laptop. Actually, she had many problems lasting many months that resulted in the replacement of most of the components of the laptop before it would work properly. During her initial phone consultation with Toshiba’s help desk, she was told to restore the operating system. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever had to do this, but it basically involves wiping out your entire hard drive, re-installing Windows, and re-installing all of your OTHER software as well. It can take the better part of a day to return your computer to its original state.

But it’s worth itif it works, right? The problem was, restoring the system didn’t work. And every time she called Toshiba after that, they would tell her to restore the system again. She said to me, “Sure, that’s easiest for them, but it’s not easiest for me! Shouldn’t they be more concerned about making life easy for me, since I’m the customer?”

They should. Think carefully about whether or not you are unnecessarily wasting a customer’s time. For example, when you call a company to get help, you often have to give the automated system your name, address, or other information. Most of us understand that this information is needed. When customers get frustrated is when they have to repeat that information again if and when they reach a company representative. A study conducted by Aspect Software showed that customers who had to repeat their information were less likely to be satisfied with their customer service experience. This may seem like a small step, but making customers repeat their actions implies two things, 1) that you don’t have a streamlined system the feeds information from one customer interaction to the next , 2) that you don’t care about their time.

Repetition is frustrating for everyone. Doing the same thing, again and again, can make a person crazy. It’s a small thing you can do for your customers, acknowledge in some way the efforts they have already made, and don’t make them jump through the same hoops repeatedly, especially when they already know what’s on the other side.

Just the other day at the Baltimore Business Journal’s Best Places to Work Luncheon, I ran into a colleague who had recently moved. He had a horror story about Verizon. Just like many other people I have spoken to, and consistent with my own experience, Verizon delayed the connection of his new service, left him without service, and forced him to make literally more than a dozen calls to their customer service center.

Verizon suffers from the basic inability to pretend they care that you don’t have service (See, “If you don’t care, at least fake it”). Sometimes they give you a lackluster “I’m sorry”. Verizon regularly violates rule number one of addressing customer complaints, “Be accessible to your customers”. When people have to wait 30 minutes to speak to someone, they are in a bad mood and are less likely to purchase from you again, even before you have a chance to resolve their issue! Customers expect things to go wrong, so if you handle that first call well you can keep them, or even make them think better of you because you were able to be so helpful.

Unfortunately, over 30 percent of customers don’t get things resolved in the first call. And if you are a Verizon customer, you might never get things resolved. I didn’t, and now I’m with Cavalier.