'Wow' Customer service begins and ends with People!

Companies who decide to run from their customers and are not easy (or close to impossible) to deal with eventually do this at their own peril. You only have to read the blogs and the numerous customer complaint websites, newspaper articles etc. to get a flavor of this.

If the cost effective self-service options are not working or not attractive, sooner or later the customer needs to able to easily access a real person. Any person dealing with your customers MUST be able to relate to a customer, understand him or her, be able to provide solutions readily and especially seem to care.

I am not preaching anything new here. Yet, I am continually blown away by the fact that so many companies have lofty mission statements, strategies and all that good stuff and then, look what they do in practice. How many company leaders are daydreaming in technicolor, I sometimes wonder. If I asked them: Would You Do Business With You?, how many would say Yes, after they had a real customer experience with their own company.

What happens to all the satisfaction and loyalty surveys? What happens with the Key Performance Indicators? Do leaders really listen? Apparently not enough; witness the revealing American Customer Satisfaction Index scores and reports over the years.

So far my rant.

I decided to write this blog entry because I came across a blog inviting people to share their Wow experiences as material for a book. The author noted how few stories he had come across and was receiving on his blog.

I would like to share a story of a service encounter of the superior kind that occurred five years ago. Yes, five years! That demonstrates the Power of Wow. I have told this story many times and now I do it again.

In Toronto we have a sport store that sells everything under the sun related to sports and is upscale in its positioning. SportingLife staff are really in tune with their audience. I went in to find a pair of New Balance shoes in extra width and I was also looking for a sale. Since this is a superstore with a wide array of brands they did not carry special widths. We tried a few solutions and then the patient and understanding sales associate asked me to sit down for a few moments because she 'wanted to try something'. Five minutes later she came back and told me that she had phoned around several of New Balance's own stores, found what I was looking for and asked me if I was interested in the shoes and sale price she had found. I was delighted, of course and said Yes. She then phoned the store in question and arranged for the shoes to be held for me.

Did she sell anything to me? No. Did she bring profits to SportingLife? The answer is yours…

So, why cannot more corporations (B2B or B2C) hire and enable people like this associate and create Wow experiences for their customers??? That is the question.

What say you? Comments? Ideas? Would you do business with you?


Eric Fraterman
eric@customerfocusconsult.com
www.customerfocusconsult.com