Tag Archives: Customer service

October 10, 2018 · 4:00 pm

Why Don’t They Answer The Phone?

I wrote last week about the new area in which I’ve begun consulting. Thank you, by the way, to all of you who both read the announcement and sent along your support.

The bulk of the people to whom I speak about investing in a franchise come to me via a system of ads. Some of the ads promote a specific brand and others just speak to the great opportunity buying into a franchise affords someone who is looking to work for themselves. Both types of ads generate leads. These are people who fill out a form and ask to be contacted. With me so far?

What’s struck me after contacting nearly 100 of these respondents is how few of them actually respond. I realize not everyone is going to answer the phone, but if they don’t, I leave a polite voicemail and send them an email as well. Obviously, they’ve provided the information. Most don’t respond to either, even to say “hey, I was bored late one night and I filled this out but I’m not really interested.”

You should know that I’m not selling them anything. My services are free. Like a realtor, I’m paid by the seller; in this case, the franchisor. Once I get them on the telephone, it takes only about 10 minutes for me to assess their needs and to figure out how we should proceed, so this process is neither time-consuming nor costly. They’ve taken the time to start the process yet they hit the brakes before it even gets going.

What’s the point for your business? Sometimes customers know they have a need but they’re afraid of solving the problem. For any of us, change is hard. For people who are unhappy with their lives, it can be crippling to believe that there is a better way on the other end of the phone or through the door to your business. In my case, most of these people want to change their lives somehow and I think they were channeling that when they filled out the form. When change came knocking at their door (or calling their phones), the fear kicked in. Any business faces that to a certain extent. Why don’t people go for physicals? Putting aside the cost, I think in part it’s because they don’t feel bad and they don’t want to know if something is wrong. If the states didn’t mandate auto inspections, how many people would routinely have a mechanic give it the once over as preventative maintenance?

Part of what we need to do as good businesspeople is to guide our customers. They may be fearful or reluctant. Remember that they wouldn’t be at your door if they didn’t have a problem big or small that they need to be solved. Your job (and mine) is to help them with that solution and a better life. Make sense?

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August 27, 2018 · 9:55 am

The Sense Of Being Valued

I was reading an article about an emerging form of advertising the other day. It’s a form in which people who view ads are paid for having done so. You can read the article about it here but one thing in the article got me thinking and I hope it has the same effect on you.

The CEO of the company that’s doing this – AdWallet – was asked if this was just “slackers” trying to put a few extra bucks in their pockets. What he had to say was this:

They’re not Millennial slackers looking to earn money on the side, he says. Instead, the average AdWallet user is 45 years or older and earns more than $100,000 a year. The main reason they have been using the platform, he says, is not the money, but the sense of being valued (emphasis added).

That’s something that often gets lost in the marketing process, especially when expressing value to our customers takes a backseat to making more money off of them. For example, many companies are using chat-bots for customer service. Nothing infuriates me more than when I have a problem and, after having tried to solve the problem myself, I call customer service only to reach a phone tree. Reaching a bot instead of a human using many companies’ “live chat” help feature is just as bad. The message I get is “we value profits more than we value you.”

It’s almost as bad as when I get a human and they have no insight at all as to who I am. I give them account information or order numbers and they have no record of past transactions or the fact that I might have called in the past with an issue. I had this experience recently with one of the large ticketing companies. I was supposed to get a CD with at ticket purchase and the code they sent didn’t work. I spent 20 minutes reaching a human who promised me to get back to me with an answer. It’s been two months: No CD and no explanation. Message received: “we are so damn big that we don’t have to care.”

I’ve had similar issues with financial service companies (almost an oxymoron there since their “service” is non-existent) and many others, as I’m sure you have. Yes, I sometimes express my frustration via social media and here on the screed. More often than not I do whatever I can do to avoid interacting with this company again, taking my business elsewhere is at all possible.

When I was running an online commerce store I used to remind our customer service types that I didn’t expect them to solve every problem that arose. What I did expect, however, is that every single customer knew that we valued them, were listening. and would do whatever we could to rectify the issue even if it meant we’d sacrifice some margin by expending time and resources to do so. It’s always easier to retain and up-sell an existing customer than to find a new customer. You do that by letting them know how much you value them on a regular basis. What was the last time you did that?

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May 18, 2018 · 9:18 am

Mistakes Were Made

Foodie Friday, and I’ll bet that a number of you will be going out this weekend. We’ve all had the problem of placing a food or drink order and what you ordered isn’t what you get. It’s really a problem when you’ve ordered delivery. What’s more frustrating than your vegetarian pizza showing up with pepperoni or your steamed dumplings arriving fried?

Mistakes happen. I used to run an online store that fulfilled tens of thousands of orders each year. Mathematically speaking, if we performed perfectly 99.9% of the time, there are still 100 screwed up orders out of every 100,000 (and we did way more orders than that). What I used to ask my folks was to listen to the customer (and put aside their heated and often unpleasant language), apologize for the problem (even if we didn’t cause it), and solve it. Maybe they clicked on a wrong key or maybe our inventory system didn’t react in real time, telling them that something was in stock when it wasn’t. It doesn’t matter. They are customers, and it’s easier to retain a customer than it is to find a new one.

Let’s go back to our delivery example (since today is food-related!). Suppose the cook forgot to pack the drinks ordered with the pizza. How can you catch this before the customer even knows there’s an issue? Make every person in the chain responsible for checking the order. Does it match the ticket? As an aside, I always ask the restaurant to read me back my order when I place it and I’m always surprised when they don’t ask to do that themselves. If the ticket isn’t right, no matter what steps are taken along the way, the order is wrong.

But let’s suppose there is a failure and the food goes out without the sodas. When the customer asks where they are, you have a few options. Send out a second delivery person (if you have one), make a second trip (if you don’t), or empower the delivery person to hit a store near the customer and buy what’s missing. My guess is that this is the fattest, least expensive solution since it minimizes the time to correct the mistake. Another option when the customer calls to complain might be to credit back the missing items as well as some or all of what was delivered. The reality is if they care enough to call you need to care enough to keep them.

Any business is a team effort. No one can think, much less say, it’s not my job to take responsibility for making a customer happy. Whether you’re a food business or not, read back what a customer is asking. Say something if the order is right but something seems off (“oh, you DON’T want chocolate on the pizza, you want chocolate cake!”). Most importantly, be prepared for mistakes. They’re going to happen. The real challenge, beyond preventing them as best you can, is making a customer happy when they occur. How are you doing with that?

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