Business is full of good stuff about money, process and demand manipulation. McKinsey says there’s been a multiplication of ‘customer touch-points’, which makes it all more complex, but customer engagement is the most important aspect of current marketing. And even big companies seem to realise people are changing, as Duncan Watts of Yahoo ruefully observes:
‘Once you accept your intuition about how people behave is inherently flawed then you really need a different model for learning about the world.’
So focus on your understanding of people and your service skills or you’ll suffer.
Customer service can make or break you
I’m not quite yet blue in the face (but very nearly) saying that it’s getting the people-thing right that will get you marketing brilliance faster than anything else. You’ve got to hire the right people, coach these people, learn how to talk to people and respect people.
Most of all you’ve got to love your customers.
First impressions count. Walk into the reception of any company and the greeting and the energy levels tell you a lot about the company.
First impressions
- When Saatchi & Saatchi first set up in business in the early 1970s in Golden Square in Soho their reception was about half the floor space of the whole agency. The back offices were small but the first impressions were of a big and successful business.
- Go into Abbott Mead Vickers, Marylebone Road, today and you get a feeling of freedom, youth and of a lot of business going on.
- Google HQ in Zurich is colourful, fun, witty and lively, with great sense of pride in the brand and of helping people perform at their best. And how about reclaimed and brightly painted cable cars as breakout rooms?
- And one not-so-brilliant first impression. A digital marketing company I saw recently had no one on reception so I wandered around until someone said, ‘Who are you looking for?’ I felt like saying, ‘Don’t bother, I’m a virtual guest.’
The British banks and service
Banks are not coached to like people or trust them. They’re not places that like to say ‘yes’. Until the credit boom came along, that is, and then they were falling over themselves to lend you money. But culture embeds deeply and the patina of the cultural woodwork is hard to change.
After the PPI scandal, in which it was discovered banks had sold customers £8 billion of unneeded insurance, people tried – at first to no avail – to get their money back. And then, as happens, one bank recanted and the floodgates of regret opened and repayment started. What it seemed to me should have happened is the service provider should have said:
‘We thought we had this right.
But it turns out we didn’t and we’re very sorry.
We are delighted to repay you in full.
Please accept our apologies and we wish you well.
If there’s anything we can do for you please call this number…’
Instead they grumpily and with bad grace wrote to customers protesting their innocence and outrage that they had to pay back the money. In the case of someone I know, the cheque he got was much bigger than he’d expected to receive but the way in which he received it left so unpleasant a taste he fired his bank once he’d cashed it.
If you don’t try and turn a complaint into a surprised and grateful customer you are missing a trick.
Customer service in small businesses
Imagine two restaurants both serving identical good food. In one the service is genial, fast and friendly, in the other surly, slow and stressed. Easy to choose where you’d go. Actually the food has to be quite a lot worse in restaurant one and your hunger really profound to even make restaurant two an option.
The restaurant analogy works for me. In running an advertising agency I regarded myself as the maître d’, my account people as waiters, the creative people as the kitchen and the creative director a heavily swearing, sweaty, red-eyed head chef distrustful of a world who sometimes didn’t like his culinary expertise. The media people were like wine waiters who understood mysteries denied to most of us and decanted media plans, sniffing them as they did so. It’s a fantasy, but the concept of CEO as maître d’ speaks to me and to the need to place the customer at the heart of your business.
Meeting, greeting, anticipating and looking after your customers’ needs are skills we need to develop.
B2B service … where the buyer gets lost in the system
McDonald’s skill at service is underestimated by some. The restaurants are easy to find, consistent in quality, you get what you ask for and the price is set. Compare this with a design or advertising agency. You meet the boss once. The initial work is terrific. Then you meet junior people who don’t understand what they are selling to you and there are lots of hidden extras. And you feel a bit unwelcome … especially if you complain and then you are probably made to feel ungrateful or stupid or both. The brutal truth is quite a lot of creative businesses are only semi-house-trained, as it were.
The way you treat your staff will affect the way they treat their customers. Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, said it took less than a week for nasty management to corrode the behaviour of front-line people. The art is to run a happy shop (most good advertising agency heads still call their agencies shops) that is open, confident and on the customer’s side.
People as brands
We need to personalise the whole branding thing. The killer question, which can be asked of yourself or your company, is this:
‘Who are you (now)?’ Not who were you or who would you like to be but who are you NOW?
JesperKunde, the Danish marketer and author of Corporate Religion: Building a Strong Company, says this:
‘Branding is about the company fulfilling its potential, not about a new logo. What is my mission in life? What do I want to convey to people? And how do I make sure that what I have to offer the world is actually unique?’
You can’t always choose what you do. But you can choose how you do it.
Interestingly, people are unique, although in large companies we often seem determined to train them into clones.
Look at the big people-brands of the past ten years: Steve Jobs, Jamie Oliver, Carla Sarkozy, Madonna, Helen Mirren, Shane Warne and so on. All of these stand or stood for something. Linda Barker thinks she is a brand and describes herself in the third person, which is a bit weird, as I remarked to Richard Hall just the other day.
In politics the personality of the candidate plays a major part. Does the camera love them? Do they have smiling eyes? Do they look honest? Politics plays out on TV mainly and Boris Johnson has the touch. You feel he says (come what may) what he thinks.
How to improve your relationship with customers
- Hire the right people. When you hire people, think of yourself as a ‘casting director’. Your corporate brand needs a mix of talent, not just one sort of person. But if they don’t fit in, don’t hire them, however great their CV. At Google they interview everyone 20 times – just to make sure they are getting it right.
- Help your people play to their strengths, which is what brands do. Ben & Jerry’s doesn’t waste its time talking about its slimming credentials. It lives in the land of Yum. Make sure everyone is clear about what you stand for in simple English.
- Hire a great receptionist. It’s a really important job. They are the signpost to a company.
- Learn how to smile. You could try practising. Smiling is an art: it’s not an occasional habit.
- Create an office that stands for your brand decoratively and in terms of layout. Encourage people to make where they work dramatise their brand values.
- Remember people’s names. This is something everyone in a business needs to do effortlessly. If you remember your customers’ names they’ll remember you.
- Meet all your customers once or twice a year and get them to tell you how you score along a whole variety of axes, including the following:
- Efficiency
- Effectiveness
- Improvement (or reverse) overall
- Are they made to feel appreciated?
- Money spent ensuring you constantly train your people (and yourself) to be better at customer relationships will not be money wasted. Like presentation skills, it’s all too often taken for granted.
Customer service – making it a human thing, not a process
You cannot hope to be brilliant at marketing if you don’t deliver brilliant customer service. Even if you are a waiter, work in a call centre or as a sales representative. You get out of life what you put in. Being great at customer service is one of the best and most fun jobs there is. The best people should fight their way to the front, trying to outperform their peers at exceeding customer expectation.
How brands can distinguish themselves is by the quantity and quality of goodwill they bring to their customers. And remember bad service is always anecdotal and devastating. For example: the fish dish in a well-known restaurant in Brighton was much too salty for my wife’s taste. We told the maître d’ who took it away and then brought it back saying ‘The chef and I have tasted it and it’s fine.’
If you genuinely don’t LOVE your customers, how on earth do you expect them to LOVE you and your brand?
Keeping them, not just winning them
The art of keeping your customers is underestimated and it isn’t easy in a competitive world; but keeping them costs a fraction of the cost of winning new customers. And whilst keeping them doesn’t seem as sexy as winning new ones, it’s your number-one need in building a sustainable business.
I’ve used this statement so many times but, as you’ll be discovering, one of the weapons of brilliant marketing is repetition. Charles Orvis said:
‘Your customer’s right even when he’s goddamned wrong.’
The top ten of customer relations
- People are changing, which is making customer engagement harder and more important.
- Hiring, coaching and working with the right kind of people are key.
- First impressions matter.
- If you make a mistake, say sorry nicely, fix it and try and repair the trust.
- Front-of-house should always be front-of-mind.
- Suspicious customers are like that because you’ve allowed trust to go.
- Smile.
- See things from the customers’ point of view.
- Love your customers; they are feeding you.
- Keeping customers is more important than winning new ones (although you always need new challenges).