Listening Up – Lowest Cost Step to Customers’ Dollars
Jan 29th, 2010 by Kate Nasser
Listening Low Cost Image By:Frederic Poirot
Listening up to the level of your customers’ expectations brings in your customers’ dollars.
Makes sense yes? A Businessweek article http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_52/b4015405.htm entitled Listening Up – Building a Customer-Based Culture once again highlighted the importance of the ultimate connection with your customers:
- Listen to your customers.
- Provide action quickly.
- Save their day to build customer loyalty.
- Continuously train your staff to improve these customer focused skills.
Then why do companies put primary focus on uniformity of customer service that breeds non-listening and often unmemorable service? Almost every call center sounds the same, has the same scripted non-caring service, and does not build the customers’ desires to spend dollars.
The lowest cost step to customers’ dollars is to listen up to the level of their expectations and deliver unique and memorable service!
What fears are stopping most leaders from acting on this customer-focused common sense?
- Empowerment and creativity as a culture is dangerous. Actually, empowering innovation and creativity throughout the business is critical in this decade. Customers do not seek uniformity in service. They want service that matches their individual needs. GEN Y has grown up with personalized everything. They will not be loyal to cookie cutter call centers, service, or products.
- We cannot measure non-standard interactions and if we can’t measure it we will fail. Metrics do not create success or breed failure. Metrics measure success that you first create and there are many ways to measure it. What you should fear is believing that measurement is a key business driver.
- If we train our people on great listening and creative problem solving, they will leave and work someplace else. Quite the opposite. Study after study shows that employees love working in customer focused organizations that excite their minds, improve their skills, and value their unique talents.
- It will cost too much. It works for high end services and products but nowhere else. I have one word to answer that — Zappos.
- We will lose our shirts without standardized approaches to customer service. Hardly. Listening and communication will actually “save your shirt” and protect you from losing customers. Billions of dollars are lost every year when customers’ leave your business because of how they were treated impersonally. A customer care culture in your company empowers every team member to seize customer loyalty through unique and personalized service.
If you are still unconvinced, keep a journal for one week of all the interactions you have with companies when you are the customer. Which ones are memorable? Why? Which would you give your dollars to, go back to and also recommend to other businesses?
Then get busy creating that culture in the business, department, or team you are leading. “A penny for your thoughts” is a phrase that can remind all your team members to listen to the customers and then deliver memorable service.
I am ready to train your teams to listen up to the level of customer expectations and take the lowest cost step to bringing in their dollars!
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach
Kate,
While I agree with you on each of these points, this comment particularly stood out for me, “Customers do not seek uniformity in service. They want service that matches their individual needs.”
It’s so true. Not everyone needs or wants the same thing, and they just want their needs met, their problem solved, not some canned scripted response.
To become the customer’s hero , we need to understand that our expectations are not necessarily the customer’s expectations, and we need to meet them where they are at right now, not where we think they are or where we think they should be.
Delivering excellent service is about satisify the customer; and to know what the customer wants, listening is imperative. Hence how come savvy companies are embracing social media, it allows them to “listen” in on what their customers are saying and respond accordingly.
But no matter our role or who our customer is (internal or external), listening to the expectation and delivering at or just above that mark, is key to success. The metrics, the morale, the retention, the costs/benefits will reflect a culture that listens to its customers – in sales, in referrals, in lower support costs, lower returns, in lower turnover, in higher morale, etc.
Great points.
…Shannon
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Hi Kate, Great post; each one of us (I mean everyone) is involved in some capacity in servicing others (family, friends, customers, bosses, etc).
I once heard from my mentor Hector LaMarque – Money is an issue when there is not value on the service we render. Most companies have Customer Service as their “core competence”.
However in reality they have internal silos where they just care about their immediate manager supervisor no really about servicing their coworkers. It happens at my company…it is really frustating when you see people from materials, logistics, warehousing, that do not interact with our external customers no really caring about customer service experience.