Tag Archives: Customer service

June 2, 2015 · 10:09 am

Talk To The Hand

Sometimes I feel as if I’m picking on the same companies all the time.  It’s not intentional, I swear.  It’s just that some brands seem to find stupid things to do and push corporate behavior standards to a new low.  With that disclaimer, let us ruminate over the good folks at Spirit Airlines and their latest genius move:

Florida-based Spirit Airlines, the ultra-low-cost carrier, is taking a different tack. Spirit has instead put a robot in control of its Twitter operation to automatically respond to questions.

“A big social media team costs money, so we put our feed on autopilot to save you cents on every ticket,” the airline explains on its Twitter site.

You can’t make this up.  What have we learned about marketing over the last ten years or so?  Your list of words might include “conversation”, “listen”, “personalized”, and any number of other terms that are diametrically opposed to a robot.  Tweet something to Spirit’s “customer service” account and you get the same automated message as the last guy:  a link to a website with FAQ‘s and a list of phone numbers.  While I haven’t actually called any of those numbers (since I refuse to set foot on a Spirit flight ever again), one hopes that there is an actual human on the other end.   Which raises the obvious question – if you’re paying for CSR’s for one channel (the phone), why not do so for another, more convenient and widely used channel (social media)?

Here is yet another business decisions that’s selfish.  Spirit thinks it can save money by not paying someone to work on social, and will allegedly pass those savings on.  You believe that?  If so, I have oceanfront property in Arizona for you.  If a track record shows us anything, this is a brand that will find a way to wring every last penny out of its customers (first to charge baggage fees, first to charge carry-on fees, first to charge to print a ticket, first to charge to pick a seat – shall I go on?).  How stupid do they think consumers are?

Put Spirit’s move in this context from today’s Media Post:

Overall, 47% of tweets about the five biggest U.S. carriers (United, American, Delta, Southwest, and JetBlue) were negative, compared to just 20% positive, Crimson Hexagon found. The total volume of tweets mentioning these airlines has increased 209% since January 2012.

Is that a channel you want to ignore as an airline (or any other brand)?  Is the message “talk to the hand because the ears ain’t listening” really how any brand wants to be perceived?  Robots? I think not.  You?

 

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Filed under Consulting, digital media, Huh?

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May 1, 2015 · 10:05 am

Cooking For Customers

This Foodie Friday I want to write about something I picked up during Gordon Ramsay‘s AMA session on Reddit this week.  You can read the entire transcript here and for those of you who only think of Chef Ramsay as the screaming maniac  on Hell’s Kitchen it’s worth the read.  One of the questions concerned his views of the Michelin Guide, the oldest international hotel and restaurant reference guide, which awards Michelin stars for excellence to a select few establishments.  Chef Ramsay’s restaurants have won many Michelin stars and his restaurant, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, gained its third Michelin star in 2001, making Ramsay the first Scot to achieve that feat.

Ramsay at BBC Gardeners' World Live 2008

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

These stars can make or break a business, and unlike reviews on Yelp or elsewhere they are given by a carefully trained team of reviewers after multiple visits.  Given his track record on winning them, one might think that Ramsay had figured out how the system works and cooks to win the stars that propel his business.  Not so much:

So the stars are awarded to the restaurant. And sometimes the chefs think the stars belong to the chefs, but they belong to the restaurant. The service is just as important. Michelin’s had a hard time in America, because it was late coming to the table. But if there’s one thing I respect, it’s consistency. They manage to identify consistently, and it’s all there for the customer. So when people ask me “What do you think of Michelin?” I don’t cook for the guide, I cook for customers.

That is good guidance whether your business involves a kitchen or not. First, there is a recognition that his business – and yours! – are taken as a whole and reflect the strengths and weaknesses of the team.  The front of house service is just as important as the food.  Your customer service is just as important as the quality of your product or professional service.  Second, his focus is not on catering to the reviewers.  It is squarely where it belongs – on his customers.

Each of us can ask if were cooking for reviewers – our bosses, our board, our stockholders – rather than our customers.  We need to think of the business as a team effort and not as some reflection of our own worth.  The statement, above, is a great reminder of that to me.  You?

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April 28, 2015 · 11:52 am

The Delusion Gap

Some mornings as I’m writing this I feel like I’m Chevy Chase reading the news that Generalissmo Francisco Franco is still dead because so much of what crosses my digital desk as news is just so “duh.”  When I read about the latest report out of the folks at IBM and Econsultancy called The Consumer Conversation Report I really did say “and Franco is still dead” out loud.  Here is why.

There is a huge gap between marketers’ intentions and their customers‘ satisfaction.  As the report says:

A common theme throughout this research is that brands’ belief in the strength of their customer experience doesn’t line up with their customers’ reality.

For example:

  • Only one in three consumers believe that their favorite companies understand them.
  • Of those consumers who switched consumer services in the last year, most did so for reasons companies should be able to predict and prevent.
  • Of the nearly 50% of consumers with a significant service issue in the last 12 months, only 28% say that the company dealt with it very effectively.

That’s a pretty important point.  We can’t pat ourselves on the back in business.  Our partners and customers are only ones who can do that for us and in this case they’re telling us something very different.  When 90% of the responding companies felt they were able to resolve customer conflicts in a satisfactory manner and not even 60% of customers felt the same way, there is a problem.  Let’s call it the delusion gap – the space in between our beliefs and those of our customers.  We all know that anger and frustration lie in the gap between expectations and experiences.  I’d suggest that the delusion gap is a direct corollary to that difference.

We need to use all of the data we gather to develop honest answers.  They might not be the ones we want to hear but they’re the beacons that point us to serving our constituencies better.  If two-thirds of those groups believe we don’t understand them and we believe otherwise, someone is delusional.  You?

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