Customer service speaker & consultant- keynote speaker – - author Micah Solomon’s customer service blog: COLLEGE OF THE CUSTOMER

They’re so astoundingly clean that I thought, sitting inside Bob’s café for half an hour, the windows were actually open (which would have been a strange situation in the rainy cool of the Oregon winter).  It wasn’t until I looked at the building’s exterior that I realized no windows were open. They had just been cleaned to the point of utter invisibility.

Clean windows, of course, don’t create customer or operational excellence.  They’re more of a marker for it.  Because, to have windows this clean, in spite of entropy, customer noses, and plain old dust (it is a mill), requires:

• Care: This one is obvious.

• Awareness: Employees can care, but if they don’t have an awareness of details (the broad psychological trait called “conscientiousness,”) mere caring is not quite enough.

• The resources — sufficient time, manpower, money — to keep them clean.  You can try to care and have an awareness of details, but by themselves these aren’t enough.  Operational and customer-focused excellence require enough time, people, and money.   Think of poor Amtrak,  endlessly resource-deprived, with frustrated employees and decaying physical plants, and it’s no surprise there is such a clear contrast between the sparkling view in their “See America at See Level” marketing and what you actually are able to see through the scratched and filthy windows of their passenger cars.

These three factors — care, awareness, and resources — matter in all aspects of an operation.  But if you want to quickly size up a company without taking a backstage tour, take a peek at the windows.

See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah Solomon’s customer service bestseller,” Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization.”

This morning, at the ticket counter of my usually-favorite airline, Southwest, I was disappointed to hear the gate agent ask an elderly, slightly flustered traveler,
“Sweetie, do you have a form of photo identification for me to see?”

Ouch.

Of course, if you call everyone “sweetie” or “hon,” I’m fine with that: It just means that we’re in Baltimore, or at a diner in Jersey.  But that wasn’t this situation: The only passenger the gate agent called “sweetie” was this elderly woman.

Kindness is one thing. Patronization another.  In customer service, this is an important lesson to learn.  Don’t treat seniors, or the disabled, like they’re preschoolers. For that matter, think twice before treating preschoolers like preschoolers.

See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah Solomon’s customer service bestseller,” Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization.”

Nearly everybody (here in the U.S.) tips the waitress.  After all, tipping in that context is a public event: people are watching. Loudon Wainwright even closes his concerts with a hilarious musical plea to do so.

But what about hotel housekeeping? Hey, nobody’s looking.  Just as your peers won’t ever learn your questionable taste in pay-per-view movies, they’ll never know you forgot the nearly-invisible, often-considered-expendable souls who make the hospitality experience…the hospitality experience.

Philosophers (including the rabbis in the Talmud), say the greatest form of charity is charity given when nobody is looking, and when the recipient doesn’t even know who gave the donation.Gratuities aren’t exactly charity, but the same principle applies.

Tip your housekeeper.

See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah Solomon’s customer service bestseller,” Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization.”

See Micah Solomon Speak Live! (Keynote Speech)

One of the keys to giving great customer service–profitable service that builds your company–is to let customers know you take it personally.

- Let customers know that their phone calls, their visits, their sales transactions matter to you, make a difference for you.

- Make it clear that you’re looking forward to repeat visits in the future–that customers will be missed during their absence.

- And, when things go wrong, apologize as if you mean it (and you should, actually, mean it).

Paradoxically, though, one of the key traits for customer-facing employees is optimism–which, in the context of customer service work, often means not taking it personally.

Service and sales can be draining. Setbacks are common, reversals of fortune occur—and if you’re inclined to a pessimistic view of things, you won’t be able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

In high burnout jobs, as psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman famously has demonstrated, the single most important difference between success and failure isn’t intelligence, luck, or experience. It’s whether employees have an ‘‘optimistic explanatory style’’ or a pessimistic one.

That’s because a pessimistic attitude (‘‘That customer doesn’t really want to hear from me’’) tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy (‘‘I can’t call on that customer out of the blue now—we haven’t spoken in months, and she’s probably taken her business to another company.’’)

This means, in an absolutely critical way, that you can’t take things personally.  Or you’ll end up hiding under the counter in the fetal position.

Micah Solomon, customer service strategist and keynote speaker

See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah Solomon’s customer service bestseller,” Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization.”

It’s not just what you do that matters.  Sometimes the order in which you do things makes a critical difference. This is true in business, as it is in life.

One example from the world of customer service: When you encounter an upset customer, you can:

1 Apologize to a customer.

2 Hear her out at length.

3 Help her find a solution.

These tasks, in this order, work very, very well.  But, alternatively, you might:

1 Blurt out your proposed solution right away, rushing the customer to a resolution

…at which point,  any attempt to

2 Apologize and

3 Hear her out

will fall on deaf ears.

Both approaches include the same three ingredients.  But the results will be worlds apart.

From Micah Solomon - author, keynote speaker, consultant on customer service excellence, sales, branding, and transforming company cultures in our socially connected world.

See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah Solomon’s customer service bestseller,” Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization.”

See Micah Solomon in Action! (Keynote Speaker--Live.)

Tell me if you’ve noticed this too. Irony of ironies, the most frustrating customer service encounters often happen at companies that think their service is the bee’s knees:

• Certain grand hotels.

• Particular local-legend restaurants.

• That boutique grocery on the corner.

The tricky problem here is that most customers are content, even happy, with the service at these institutions.  So when, out of the blue, a customer begs to differ, just watch the managerial knees as they jerk in defense of the status quo and how it’s being interpreted by employees.

But a customer has a far more intimate view of how employees are coming across than a manager ever will. As a manager, you do have intimate knowledge of your employees’ quirks, their family and personal issues, their dedication to the job. And you know that these folks, who work for you, are, unsurprisingly, nice enough to you.  But that doesn’t mean you know how they’re treating your customer – or, more to the point, how your customer perceives that treatment.

If a customer implies your employees are bureaucratic, unempathic, policy-driven, consider for a moment that it might be true. Believe what the customer in front of you is telling you, until proven otherwise.

The customer, and only the customer, is the customer.

From Micah Solomon - author, keynote speaker, consultant on customer service excellence, sales, branding, and transforming company cultures in our socially connected world.

See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah Solomon’s customer service bestseller,” Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization.”

See Micah Solomon in Action! Live Keynote Speech.

One of the great destroyers of company value is the digging-in-your-heels phenomenon.

Your poorly hired and poorly trained staff member is confronted by a customer who wants an exception, an accommodation–something that requires a break from your company’s ordinary procedures.

Instead of seeing this as a chance to take the customer’s side for the sake of both the customer and your company’s survival, the opposite happens: The better the arguments of the customer, the more entrenched your representative becomes, the more invested in “winning.”

Leaders know you don’t win an argument with a customer.  But have you gotten this across to your people?

From Micah Solomon - author, keynote speaker, consultant on customer service excellence, sales, branding, and transforming company cultures in our socially connected world.

See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah Solomon’s customer service bestseller,” Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization.”

See Micah Solomon in Action! (Keynote Speaker--Live.)

There’s no truer truism in customer service than this one: You’re only as strong as your weakest link.

It’s frustrating to a business leader to do everything right, 90 percent of the time, then have one jackass of an employee slip through your hiring process and ruin your reputation with customers, txting his girlfriend right in front of the guests he’s supposed to be checking in.  This scenario causes nightmares for even the most  conscientious business leaders. And it is worth losing sleep over.

But at the same time, don’t forget to celebrate the power of your strongest link.  That one shining employee with an unearthly desire-to-serve glow, empathy with your customers, and an entrepreneurial attitude.

Pay attention to the effect such a strong link in your organizational chain has on the customers she wows, and the peers she inspires. You may not be able to fully measure the effect, but you dearly need to be aware of it.

From Micah Solomon - author, keynote speaker, consultant on customer service excellence, sales, branding, and transforming company cultures in our socially connected world.

See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah Solomon’s customer service bestseller,” Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization.”

See Micah Solomon in Action! (Keynote Speaker--Live.)

One of the realities of social media feedback from customers  is that it would feel more comfortable to not receive that feedback at all—the harsher stuff at least—in an open forum.

It’s undeniably nicer to have your customers voice their complaints to you directly and discreetly rather than hit the social media ‘‘airwaves’’ with them. So, one part of dealing with social media feedback from customers is to reduce the need for it by making sure your customers know, as directly as possible, how to reach you.

Think about it this way: If your friend saw you had your fly undone, would he tweet about it? No, he’d quietly tell you. [And if nobody tells you when you’re fly is undone, you clearly have no friends!]

Use the same principle to your advantage here. Why should customers address issues to you indirectly via Twitter or their blogs when they can use email, the phone, or a feedback form on your website and know that it will be answered—immediately and with empathy?

With their round-the-clock access to the social airwaves, make sure that the first impulse of customers is to reach you—day or night:

•  Have ‘‘chime in’’ forms everywhere; this is akin to building escape valves for steam into your machinery.

• Where your FAQ’s fail to answer customer questions, be sure you offer a direct, immediate way to get a personal response by chat, telephone, or email.

• Don’t send out mass emails to customers from “please do not reply” addresses—your goal is to make it easy to reply.

You get the picture. If you’re Amazon.com or another online aggregator, with a vast product line that’s supplied in large part by outside vendors, your sensitivity to open conversations will be lowered; your customers can let off steam with zero downside for your overall brand. But most of us, obviously, aren’t Amazon.com.

From Micah Solomon - author, keynote speaker, consultant on customer service excellence, sales, branding, and transforming company cultures in our socially connected world.

See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah Solomon’s customer service bestseller,” Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization.”

See Micah Solomon in Action! (Keynote Speaker--Live.)

This is too much fun to not alert my friends to: I want to invite those of you who may be interested to two events, both in Copenhagen at the lovely Hotel Scandic and both organized by MBCE, a training and conference company with over 15 years experience.

1) I will be the keynote speaker for the fabulous  Copenhagen Contact Center Conference  on March 16.  Please come!

2) I will also be leading an Executive Workshop the following week, on March 21.

Here is complete information including a video clip and more:  http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/1/prweb9116602.htm

Complete information in English on the Executive Workshop is available as well at the following link: http://mbce.dk/pdf/MicahSolomon_workshop.pdf

From Micah Solomon - author, keynote speaker, consultant on customer service excellence, sales, branding, and transforming company cultures in our socially connected world.

See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah Solomon’s customer service bestseller,” Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization.”