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When to Respond in an EXTRAordinary Fashion

January 17, 2019 By The Support Soigneur Leave a comment


Most of us have jobs that involve customers and customer service, even if that is not in your actual job title.  My question to you today is when is it appropriate to do something extra-ordinary?  Chances are, “Do something special for customer,” is not on any forms at your organization, unless you work at Zappos or on my team at ETE.  Well, my team doesn’t have any written mandate, but I do urge them to do the unexpected as often as possible.
Special responses happen reactively rather than proactively far too often.  Consider the value the organization receives.  If you move mountains for a customer but it’s in response to their dissatisfaction, have you really done anything more than get back to net zero?  While solving issues is important, the real objective of going the extra mile is creating a WOW! experience for a customer, so they’ll tell everyone about how amazing you and your business are.
A popular customer service metric called NPS (net promoter score) focuses on this.  The logic is simple, on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being most satisfied only the low and high scores matter.  Everything in the middle is thrown out.  Those customers had an expectation and you merely met it or were close enough.  They are not likely to promote your company or bad mouth it.  The focus is to limit negative experiences and increase the exceedingly satisfied ones.
Back to your job.  Does out of the ordinary occur when:

  • a customer leaves a negative review on the internet
  • you like their car
  • they have an insider connection
  • it’s a good customer who is loyal and promotes your business
  • the company is running a promotion
  • the customer is someone “important”?

I think the answer to when to do something special is: AS OFTEN AND AS RANDOMLY AS POSSIBLE.
I’m sure the often part makes sense to everyone, but why random?  I learned a great lesson in my college days bartending for a guy named Jerry.  He wanted his bartenders to give away free drinks to customers but always in a surprising fashion.  His wisdom was that anything routine, like first or last drink is on the house ends up creating an expectation and loses all its value.  He was so right!  If you don’t create a, “Wow, that’s awesome,” all you did was give something away for free, or worse.
Ok Ben, its easy to point out that doing special things for customers can create positive experiences, but someone has got to pay for all these free drinks!  No problem, your returning customers, and future referral customers, and anyone who reads the raving reviews (which will be most of them) will happily pick up the tab in the form of increased business and decreased marketing costs.  Don’t believe me?  Scared of telling all your employees to start spending your money creating WOW! experiences?  Test it.
Recall that old adage that half of your marketing dollars are wasted?  Budget some of that spend toward extraordinary responses and watch your bottom line.  Chances are your employees are already more careful about spending your money than you are.  I can’t tell you how many times my team will come to me asking for my blessing to invest $50-$100 on a customer’s experience.  My response is always the same: “Do you think it’s the right thing to do?”  “Will it result in a great experience?”  “Make sure they know what you did for them!”
If you want to make each customer experience work for the future of your business, my advice is do the extraordinary until extra-is-ordinary at your company.
 

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