Keynote speaker, expert, author, consultant: Customer service speaker Micah Solomon’s: COLLEGE OF THE CUSTOMER

If you haven’t yourself experienced the customer experience at your business, is it really wise to invite an unsuspecting public in? Can you assume, with any confidence, that they will enjoy something you’ve never tried yourself?

I’m always startled when businesses don’t work at finding out, firsthand, what it’s like to use their own service or product.

Of course, it’s easy to fail to use your own product or service: Separate employee entrance, separate employee parking, separate, streamlined login process on your website, separate everything.  Drive home at night, wash your hands, put work behind you. Until the next morning.

The photo below (from an otherwise very serviceable hotel, FWIW), shows the hazards of such oversights, in a very minor, non-life-threatening way.  Let me explain.

As a guest hoping to work from my hotel room, I’ve hand-cranked the desk chair — which is a nice chair, thoughtfully provided by the hotel, if not actually a Miller Freeman Aeron chair, at least a serviceable “Ikea Freeman” knockoff — to  literally its highest possible level.  Yet even so, I am being asked by the combination of lowish seat and highish desk to type with my elbows. Which is the kind of acrobatic maneuver I’m not at all deft at.

More easily curable, but also, as the kids say, awkward: The desk–again, thoughtfully provided–was so wobbly that it took all the cardboard I could scavenge to prop it up to plumb. [see the lower l.h. corner of the photo.]

Both if these mismatches–table height to maximum chair height,  desk instability to needs of guests, such as typing without spilling their water–would have been obvious if someone on the hotel team had tried, even once, to use the desk.

This, I argue, would beat hearing about it on Tripadvisor, wouldn’t it? Or more likely, never hearing about it.  A fate that is probably even worse.

When I consult for a business on customer service and the customer experience, one of the first steps I take is to secret-shop the establishment.  I’m pretty obsessive: A typical secret shopping report, for, say, an excellent restaurant that wants to improve further, is some 35 pages of photos and text.

Such a report may seem excessive, and perhaps it is.  But you should be trying at least a scaled-down version of shopping yourself, yourself.  As often as possible.

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PS: To correct a misconception I’ve seen elsewhere: No, you don’t need everyone who works for you to necessarily be the target customer of your business. This is a misconception in the other direction, and obviously unworkable in many situations.  For example: While the five-star Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts company does permit employees stay–free–at any of their resorts, occupancy permitting (a policy which is brilliant for obvious reasons, including employee retention), this doesn’t mean taht Four Seasons expects their employees to entirely channel the reality of their Bentley-driving median customer.  Likewise, you don’t have to be a skate punk to sell skateboard gear.  And so forth.  But you do need to have your eyes open.

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Micah Solomon is a business keynote speaker, author, and customer service consultant. Micah offers keynote speaking and consulting on customer service issues, the customer experience, and company culture — and how they fit into today’s marketing and technology landscape.  See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah’s latest bestseller,  High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service (AMACOM Books).———————————————————–

Customer service failures not only send a customer’s blood pressure skyrocketing, they can have a disastrous effect on both a business’s image and its bottom line. Pedro Hernandez of Time.Com and Small Business Computing and I discuss how to create an exceptional customer experience (and what to do when you have lapses), in today’s interview.  {Please click over, if you’d be so kind, for Mr. Hernandez’s complete article.}

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Micah Solomon is a business keynote speaker, author, and customer service consultant. Micah offers keynote speaking and consulting on customer service issues, the customer experience, and company culture — and how they fit into today’s marketing and technology landscape.  See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah’s latest bestseller,  High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service (AMACOM Books).———————————————————–

What’s the best marketing that money can buy?  It’s the customer service and support you provide.  Specifically: how you stand behind your existing customers. What could possibly matter more to someone considering buying your product–again, or for the first time–than how you address issues with the existing products you already have out in the marketplace?

Customer experience breakdowns are uncomfortable, and it can require good companywide training to learn to resolve them successfully. But you’ll find an opportunity hidden inside your company’s worst moments: the opportunity to bring a customer closer to you by showing how well you handle what can go wrong for them.

You can learn to handle customer service breakdowns so masterfully that, in most cases, the problem and its resolution can actually help you to create truly loyal customers who will become advocates for your brand, moving forward.

This is good news, because breakdowns are unavoidable in every industry. An ice storm forces you to miss a customer’s shipping deadline. A computer system goes down. A key employee walks out on you with no notice—on the only day you couldn’t possibly arrange coverage.

Or, it can be even worse: A waiter drops an entire tray of fruity drinks into a well-dressed customer’s lap.

Or, wait–it can be even worse than that: You could be Chrysler, and your customers could be dying, tragically, in the back seats of  your vehicles, due to a design defect. Not a new one, but one that was brought to your attention in 2009.

Believe it or not, even this horrific situation contained an opportunity for Chrysler to build customer loyalty.

Let me explain.

NHTSA has now famously asked Chrysler to recall the Jeep Grand Cherokees that are disproportionately and catastrophically catching on fire (the “Pintos for Soccer Moms,” as safety advocate Clarence Ditlow calls them). In response,  instead of refusing to do the recall, the new Italian owners of Chrysler could view this as an opportunity to say, in effect,

“We are a new Chrysler.  Better engineering, better management, and, above all, greater corporate responsibility.  We have an unusual, if expensive, opportunity to demonstrate this corporate responsibility by appropriately handling the defect in our product, even though it occurred under the previous management.”

This approach would have been, of course, highly expensive.  And it would have been the best marketing that money could buy.

Micah Solomon is the business keynote speaker, author, and customer service consultant termed by the Financial Post ”a new guru of customer service excellence.” Solomon offers keynote speaking and consulting on customer service issues, the customer experience, and company culture — and how they fit into today’s marketing and technology landscape.  See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah’s latest bestseller,  High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service (AMACOM Books).———————————————————–

© 2013 Micah Solomon.  Portions of this post may also have appeared in Micah’s previously published work.

As a customer service consultant, I’ll help a business transform in just about any positive way.  But boy-oh-boy, it helps to start with good raw human material.

Here’s a lovely passage on what makes a great customer service employee.  It’s from  Alain de Botton, discussing British Airways:

The airline’s survival depended upon…the loving atmosphere
that had reigned a quarter of a century earlier in a house in
Cheshire, where two parents had brought up a future staff member
with benevolence and humour—all so that today, without any
thanks being given to those parents . . . he would have both the will
and the wherewithal to reassure an anxious student on her way to
the gate to catch BA048 to Philadelphia. [ref. 1]

Now, before you object to my parent-centric determinism, let me beat you to it by objecting myself: I know people with wonderful attitudes who have come from terrible family backgrounds. So in spite of the preceding passage, and the comment by Nordstrom’s Bruce Nordstrom, who, when asked ‘‘Who really trains the salespeople?’’ [ref. 2] quipped ‘‘Their parents do,’’ I don’t literally mean to only hire people from great family backgrounds.

What I do mean is to hire people who, by the time they reach the age of employment, have come through childhood unscathed, retaining pro-customer, pro-team traits, the innate stuff that more or less can’t be taught. ‘‘Most companies hire for experience and appearance, how the applicants fit the company image,’’ Isadore Sharp of Four Seasons says. ‘‘We hire for attitude. We want people who like other people and are, therefore, more motivated to
serve them. Competence we can teach. Attitude is ingrained.’’

Zappos puts prospective employees through interviews and challenges
that fall into two disparate categories: one for basic technical
competency and the other for the softer attitude traits the company is
looking for. Each of the two is given equal weight.

(My suggestion: If you take this dual approach, do the ‘‘soft’’ part first so you don’t get overly swayed, or dismayed, by what you find in the technical part of
the prospect’s review. You don’t want to get pumped up about hiring
someone for her mad technical skills and then have to muster all manner
of willpower to decline that candidate for not being an attitude fit.)

Hire the right people, attitudinally. Train them, technologically.

[ref. 1] From Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport. 

[ref. 2] From Marilyn Suttle and Lori Jo Vest, Who’s Your Gladys.

Micah Solomon is the business keynote speaker, author, and customer service consultant termed by the Financial Post ”a new guru of customer service excellence.” Solomon offers keynote speaking and consulting on customer service issues, the customer experience, and company culture — and how they fit into today’s marketing and technology landscape.  See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah’s latest bestseller,  High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service (AMACOM Books).———————————————————–

© 2013 Micah Solomon.  Portions of this post may also have appeared in Micah’s previously published work.

To discuss why the retail customer experience matters, even when your customers are locked into buying from you, we need to back up a step or two: When you’re a retailer, there are two possible commercial relationships you can have with your customers.

Scenario 1:  Your customer has no actual need to buy what you’re selling (although she may buy it anyway).  Scenario 1 is your retail reality when you’re selling:

Scenario 2: Your customer more or less has to buy what you’re selling. Scenario 2 is your situation when you’re selling:

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In retail scenario 1,  the customer experience is the entire point of, and the entire hope for, your enterprise.  If your customer doesn’t have a fabulous, pleasing-to-the-senses-and-psyche experience, she’s not coming back to your store. (Or, even more likely these days, when socially-generated content predisposes customers to act or not act, she won’t even show up the first time). I think the value of the retail customer experience here is obvious: This is the classic “a man without a smile shouldn’t become a merchant” [note 1] scenario.

In retail scenario 2 – the scenario where your customer has to buy from you – the experience isn’t, commercially speaking, everything, (and for this reason, it is often neglected):  Your customer  has to pick up her prescription whether you’re nice to her or not.

So, be happy for whatever successful moves have landed you in a situation where the customer is required to buy your product (picking the right corner to locate your pharmacy, for example).

But don’t stop there.  Because a captive customer can quickly become a rebellious customer.  Instead of resting on your commercial laurels, consider your customer’s need, her captive-customer status, as your retail jumping-off place.  The  opportunity here comes in your ability to transform the situation from a must-have to a want-to-have.   For example, to continue with the pharmacy example: What if my nearest chain drugstore weren’t an evil-smelling dump with couldn’t-care-less employees everywhere from the front counter to the window dressers? If they had caring, motivated employees, a clean parking lot, and intuitively stocked shelves, they could turn this necessary shopping evil into a shopping opportunity for the customer, and therefore an increased share of basket opportunity for the merchant.

Umpqua Bank, one of the great customer-focused banks,  uses this theory of turning branch banking from necessary evil to desired experience.  And by doing so, they outshine their competition.

In an interview I did recently with Umpqua Regional VP Michele Livingston, she explained how Umpqua strives to turn a typically blah errand into something their customers want to do. Umpqua does this by making their branches hip: uniquely designed, with wifi, free coffee and of course, extraordinarily customer-focused employees.

Note that the hassle of changing a bank account is significant.  Most of  a bank’s customers aren’t going to jump ship on any given day, no matter how shabbily they might be treated. But superior service and a superior customer experience, Umpqua finds, results not just in happier customers, but in better financial results for the bank, due to the useful additional services the bank is able to assist their customers with. The more the customers enjoy the experience, the more natural it is for them to converse with bank employees about consolidating their IRAs, doing estate planning etc.

Even with more or less locked in customers, a little retail love goes a long way.

[note 1] Or whatever Confucius or Geronimo or whoever did (or didn’t) say this did (or didn’t) say.

Micah Solomon is the business keynote speaker, author, and customer service consultant termed by the Financial Post ”a new guru of customer service excellence.” Solomon offers keynote speaking and consulting on customer service issues, the customer experience, and company culture — and how they fit into today’s marketing and technology landscape.  See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah’s latest bestseller,  High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service (AMACOM Books).———————————————————–

© 2013 Micah Solomon.  Portions of this post may also have appeared in Micah’s previously published work.

If you want to improve customer service to the point that it becomes a competitive advantage, you have to hire great employees.  Not the best-looking employees, not the most athletic employees, not even necessarily the most technically adept employees.  But the employees who are, by their intrinsic personal traits, best suited to working with customers.

A staff hired or acquired, in other words,  whose personality traits are in line my semi-famous WETCO criteria, which I’ll briefly recap here.  To remember these in the future, just visualize a big, wet, fragrant [!] dog at PETCO.

However, proper hiring isn’t enough.  The best-selected staff in the world won’t do you much good until those staff members contribute their elective efforts.

I’m a smart person. You’re clearly a smart person. [note 2]  And many people you hire will be smart people.  Here’s the problem: Smart employees, I’m sorry to let you know, can possess a knack for doing just enough work – or what looks like work – to avoid getting into disciplinary trouble or causing other obvious unpleasantness.

Presumably, this isn’t what you were hoping for when you hired them. You didn’t mean to end up with a waiter (or front desk agent, or government agency employee, or…) with a cultivated knack for avoiding the glances of guests who want his attention.  (In today’s world, between ignored glances, that guest may be live-blogging the nightmare of her service experience at your restaurant.)  You meant to hire the waiter with the knack for picking up on and responding to the subtle eye movements of your diners.  Believe me—this employee can start his career as exactly the same person, and how he ultimately performs depends on the direction received from you, his leader.

How do you get what you want out of employees?  You start by making sure they know what you want from them.

This is not the big duh that it sounds like.  In fact, it’s the key, or one of the keys, to unlocking the elective, optional efforts that your employees can either give you or keep to themselves.   If employees think what you want is only what’s written in their job description, you’re hosed.  Hosed.  If they understand what you really want – success with customers and  sustainable success for your business – it’s a whole different ball game. Most people, all things being equal, would rather please a leader than thwart one. [note 3]

Here’s a quick example from, in this case, the world of healthcare customer service:

The Mayo Clinic is an extraordinary institution that has transformed what would be the middle of nowhere (Rochester, Minnesota) into a Mecca of healing known worldwide. And a lot of what makes them extraordinary is their customer (patient) service.

Everyone who works at The Mayo Clinic knows, from orientation onward, a single, central sentence that originated with the clinic’s founding leaders.  The sentence? “The needs of the patient comes first.”

Whether you’re a surgeon or an orderly, you understand what this means, and what its implications for your work are.  For a surgeon, the implications are profound (and rather obvious, if you’ve ever had the misfortune of encountering a surgeon with other priorities): As a surgeon working at Mayo, you are obligated to confer with colleagues in “competing” disciplines to get the best care for this patient, rather than acting like a lone wolf intent only on outfitting your next speedboat. [note 4] 

For orderlies, the implications are similarly profound.  “The needs of the patient comes first” means that if a patient is distressed, or a loved one is confused, about something in the treatment scenario, or for any other reason, it’s o.k. to drop your job duties (changing sheets, cleaning up…) and attend to that patient or loved one.

Isn’t that true customer service?

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Micah Solomon is the business keynote speaker, author, and customer service consultant termed by the Financial Post ”a new guru of customer service excellence.” Solomon offers keynote speaking and consulting on customer service issues, the customer experience, and company culture — and how they fit into today’s marketing and technology landscape.  See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah’s latest bestseller,  High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service (AMACOM Books).———————————————————–

© 2013 Micah Solomon.  Portions of this post may also have appeared in Micah’s previously published work.

Effective customer service consulting (for restaurants and foodservice, as in other industries) starts by figuring out the customer’s point of view.  Then — and only then — you consider the other stakeholders:  IT, frontline employees, marketing, management, and, eventually, the shareholders. (Let me be clear here: This does not mean these stakeholders are less important than customers. But if you can’t make something work for a customer, there’s no reason to do it.  So that’s where you start.)

In the case of Panera Bread fast casual restaurants, I was able to get the customer’s viewpoint, at least informally, by having a pretty delicious lunch.

First, I have to  tell you a secret (can you keep it?)  Panera has a new “hidden menu.”

A magnet near the register soft-pedals Panera's Hidden Menu

Does having a hidden menu make any sense? Does it make sense for Panera itself, or for other restaurants that are trying something similar? Most importantly, would it make sense for your business to follow suit?  (Consider this question literally if you’re in foodservice, or figuratively if you’re in another industry that serves a public with varying tastes.)

My answer? “Well, maybe!”

Here’s how, over lunch, I saw the lay of the land.

On the one hand,  having a supposedly secret or hidden menu can come off to your customers as at least borderline silly. Customers are pretty much clued in that the menu is public knowledge by the QR-coded magnet near the register, by the postings on Facebook, the info that comes up if they simply Google “menu.” And anyway, in Panera Bread’s case, they’re publicly traded and little that they do* is really secret, or, as they put it, “hidden.”

But it’s not easy to succeed in business without risking looking a bit silly, or at least playful, from time to time. So I certainly don’t hold this against Panera, and I doubt another customer would.

So let’s probe further into how a hidden menu feels to a customer.

If a customer finds out about the hidden menu and wants one of the items (mostly low-gluten, low carb, lowish calorie offerings), ordering from the hidden menu actually can help a customer to feel special.  At least a bit.  The hidden-menu concept can give a customer a slight sense of sharing something insiderish with the employees.

And–and this is a huge thing in today’s world–it’s fast.  Rather than acting like a high-maintenance prima dona in an Altman movie, asking to substitute out nearly every ingredient in the original recipe, you can order hidden menu item 2, or 4.  Done.

Of course, most customers don’t want anything to do with the items on a secret menu.  (If most people do want one of the hidden items,  the item should be moved to the regular menu.).  So it saves time for uninterested customers to not to have to sift through these rarely-ordered items.

And of course, it keeps you on brand.  Why would a haven for gluten lovers like Panera, which even has the word “bread” in its name, want to bring up the carb or gluten concepts? It wouldn’t.  Except if you are in need.  And want to be in the know.

Micah Solomon is the business keynote speaker, author, and customer service consultant termed by the Financial Post ”a new guru of customer service excellence.” Solomon offers keynote speaking and consulting on customer service issues, the customer experience, and company culture — and how they fit into today’s marketing and technology landscape.  See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah’s latest bestseller,  High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service (AMACOM Books).———————————————————–

© 2013 Micah Solomon.  Portions of this post may also have appeared in Micah’s previously published work.

Apple’s personal assistron, Siri, is certainly a bit of a novelty act.  She is, however,  good at finding the question within your question. Here’s a real-life example from my so-called real life.

“Siri, I’ve got a headache.”

“Micah, I  found four drugstores* not too far from you.”

*(One time, Siri told me instead: “I found eight emergency rooms not too far from you..” “Siri,” I retorted, with some dismay, “Isn’t that a bit alarmist? I don’t think it’s that bad a headache.”

Siri, in other words, is one of the most visible (make that “audible”) manifestations of a phenomenon that’s transforming customer service: the customer expectation that information will be electronically curated for them in a personalized manner, and delivered to them instantly.

Here are some examples, ranging from the mundane to the literally lifesaving:

Amazon.com’s mix of crowdsourcing and algorithmic magic that allows it to know the item you want to buy (even if it’s not the one you thought you wanted)

• Route Happy —  sorts air travel options for you based on a “Happiness Score,” which in their words reveals “shorter flights with better planes, seats, amenities, and flyer ratings.”

• PECO Energy, a local utility in Pennsylvania, has automated messaging that lets customers know—based on the phone number they call in from–if a problem has already been reported or if it needs the customer to provide more details. It then  lets you know how long until the problem will be resolved, so you can adapt accordingly.

• The National Weather Service’s targeted “stay inside” text messaging can be pinpointed as closely as the nearest cell tower to ensure you don’t get extraneous messages or miss the one that will save your life.

What’s the moral of this story?  Bring information together for your customers.  Don’t expect them to go out surfing for it.  They may just surf right on to the next business, bypassing yours.

Micah Solomon is the business keynote speaker, author, and customer service consultant termed by the Financial Post ”a new guru of customer service excellence.” Solomon offers keynote speaking and consulting on customer service issues, the customer experience, and company culture — and how they fit into today’s marketing and technology landscape.  See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah’s latest bestseller,  High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service (AMACOM Books).———————————————————–

© 2013 Micah Solomon.  Portions of this post may also have appeared in Micah’s previously published work.

Here’s a customer service consulting secret that won’t cost you a penny, assuming you have some old luggage lying around:

Give your business the rollaboard test.

It’s a simple test you can do with a single piece of rolling luggage.

Let me explain.

This morning, holiday notwithstanding, I was sitting in a Philadelphia airport club lounge watching a fellow business passenger roll in (meaning: he walked in and his suitcase rolled in) to stock up on Wifi and crackers before a day of travel. Well-oiled though his luggage may have been, it still made the distinctive, loud sound that every rollaboard makes on a hard surface:  rat-a-ratta-ratta-tat.

You could hear him coming literally 30 feet away.

At least I could hear him 30 feet away.  The three employees behind the reception counter acted as if they had heard nothing, doing whatever they were doing until he was right in their faces and could no longer be disregarded.

At which point, regardless of how pleasantly they reacted to his arrival, it was too late for them to be truly hospitable.

What is the great constant of business travel?  Loneliness.*  And the receptionists at the counter had an opportunity to make the arriving passenger feel a little less alone by noticing his presence before they were forced to.  And, they had an amazingly audible clue–the closest possible thing to a cowbell–to help them do so.

Admittedly, not all businesses greet their customers in person, and not all customers carry noisemakers that signal their impending arrival.   But in almost any business setting–online, over the telephone, or in person–there are ways to make customers feel at home before you get down to the nuts and bolts of interacting with them.

And concentrating on these moments, these opportunities to anticipate the arrival of your customer, can make all the difference. Making it clear that you are here to serve the emotional needs of your customers rather than to ignore those customers until their presence is forced on you is one of the differentiators that make all the difference.

So that’s why I suggest you ask yourself: Would your company pass the Rollaboard test?

* The great constant of your business may be something other than the loneliness of the long-distance traveler.  For technical situations (custom fabrication), the constant for an arriving customer may be confusion, or apprehension.  For customers arriving at an institution that hands out life and death (patients and loved ones pulling up to your hospital for admission), it may be dread.  Whatever this emotional constant is, there are ways to deal with them and to make customers feel at home before you get down to the technical work of interacting with them.   

Micah Solomon is the business keynote speaker, author, and customer service consultant termed by the Financial Post ”a new guru of customer service excellence.” Solomon offers keynote speaking and consulting on customer service issues, the customer experience, and company culture — and how they fit into today’s marketing and technology landscape.  See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah’s latest bestseller,  High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service (AMACOM Books).———————————————————–

© 2013 Micah Solomon.  Portions of this post may also have appeared in Micah’s previously published work.

Customer service consulting can be intensive.  Technical.  Highly detail-involved.

But sometimes, the simplest things tell the most.  You don’t need to burn the midnight fluorescents huddled over a spreadsheet to discover some of the issues dragging a company down in its attempts to bond, for life, with its customers.

For today’s example, let’s talk about timeliness.  Often the first thing I notice when I start analyzing the customer experience for a client company?   The discrepancy between the timetable the company thinks is fine and what a typical customer actually expects in the year 2013.

The difference is, by and large, staggering. Because customers and their expectations of timeliness have changed a lot faster than the systems and standards of most businesses.  Which is a dangerous, dangerous situation for the companies in question.

What was plenty fast this time last year feels like molasses now to the very same customers because of changing expectations brought by mobile technology, social media–induced restlessness, the incredible efficiency of vendors like Amazon.com, and other factors.  To be blunt, your business will soon be roadkill  if you don’t match customers’ expectations of what “timeliness” means.

You can hire me to come check out how you’re doing, or you can get a start on it yourself.  Or, want to try to do your own customer service consulting, and avoid my fee?  Here are two quick reality-checks you can do on your own company.  No fuss, no muss:

1.  Fill out and submit an inquiry form on your own website.  How quickly does someone respond to your web inquiry?  36 hours?  That may have been fine in 2004, but a 36 hour response time is something like a hundred and eighty-nine Internet years.  You may as well not even bother at that point.

2.  Try to find out some simple but important info from your own company without contacting a human being. (The kinds of simple information I’m talking about: hours of operation for holiday weekends, for example, or GPS coordinates for driving, or the file formats that are acceptable for upload, or… –whatever is germane to your business and likely to be searched for by your customers.) Don’t phone, don’t email.  Just try to get this info from easily available sources: your site’s FAQ’s, for example.  I’ll bet you’ll find the info either isn’t there, or is incomplete.

This is bad news.  Because a customer’s impression of your company’s timeliness is destroyed when they have to contact you for what I call Stupid Stuff: for example, the questions customers are forced to call you with after they’ve searched for the answers to those same questions on your website or your mobile app—and found them nowhere. Or phone calls they have to make to your reps because your product keeps breaking on them in the exact same way, but word isn’t getting to your engineering team to get the update out that will fix it. These impositions on your customers are all what caused me to coined the term “Stupid Stuff ™’’ (although depending on the squeamishness of the client and the absurdity of the context, ‘‘stuff ’’ might or might not be the actual ‘‘S Word’’ I use).

No matter how otherwise-perfect your product or service is, in the eyes of the customer it’s broken if you either deliver the product or service late, or make it hard to find the information that would make the product or service easy to purchase and use. Worse, on-time delivery is the most movable of moving targets. What seemed speedy last year may seem snail-like today.

I know it’s not fair.  I know, quite frankly, that customer expectations can feel a bit ridiculous. Which brings me to the portion of this article sponsored by Comedy Central. I take my hat off to Louis CK for comedically skewering the endless, escalating expectations of customers – in his routine he reminds people to cut their smartphones some slack during the split second it takes the data to bounce off a tower or satellite:

Give it [your smartphone] a second. Would ya? Could you give it a second. It’s going to space. Can you give it a second? From space. Is this speed of light* too slow for you?

* I know, gentle geeks: “speed of light” is  [sic].

Well, good luck, Lucky Louis.  I don’t think customers are going to relax their absurdly escalating expectations.  So it’s up to the merchants, the vendors, to adapt to these escalations. Companies in today’s marketplace need to come up with solutions that stay in step with customers’ ever more extreme perception of what ‘‘in a timely fashion’’ means. Because if they don’t, their competition will step in to fill the timeliness void.

Micah Solomon, author of “High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service“, is the business keynote speaker, author, and customer service consultant termed by the Financial Post ”a new guru of customer service excellence.” Solomon offers speaking and consulting on customer service issues, the customer experience, and company culture — and how they fit into today’s marketing and technology landscape. An entrepreneur and business leader, he previously coauthored the bestselling “Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit“.

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See Micah in action — including video and free resources — at http://www.micahsolomon.com. Or, click here for your own free chapter  of Micah’s new book,  High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service (AMACOM Books) and Micah’s #1 bestseller, Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization———————————————————–

© 2013 Micah Solomon.  Portions of this post may also have appeared in Micah’s previously published work.