Stories about How Amazingly Responsive You Are

Having a consistently well-executed policy of immediate response to customers, prospects, and partners is the most overlooked and underused competitive advantage in business. It's actually difficult for me to write about this because it's so obvious, so powerful, so simple, and so available to anyone that I am in disbelief that anyone wouldn't use it.

Immediate response applies to communication with customers, prospective customers, and partners (vendors, collaborators, suppliers, etc.). It goes double, triple, or quadruple for any of those entities who are experiencing a problem. The idea is that I will respond to those people as quickly as I possibly can, or I will have a system or process in place that makes it happen automatically.

When I say automatically, I most definitely do not mean an automated, canned, one-message-for-everyone approach like, “Your e-mail/call/message is important to us. We will get back to you as quickly as we can.” All that shows is that once upon a time somebody programmed an auto-response because they aren't competitive enough to give you a real response. It also says: “We're busy working on something more important than you. We'll get to you when we have some extra time. Here's a canned response to hold you off for a while.”

The goal is for a real person to respond in real time in such a way that it differentiates your performance from anyone else they do business with. You want to set the standard here. You want to demonstrate that their business is the most important thing in your world. You want them telling stories to other people (prospective customers) about how amazingly responsive you are and how you don't just say that you value their business and their time, you prove it.

Brian Will Get Back to You Immediately

I was in the market for a new website designer/manager. I change my site fairly often, so it was important to me that I hire someone who responded quickly. I asked a couple of my friends whom they used and would recommend, and they both said that I should contact a guy named Brian Kraker. They both said that he did great design work and also said “he'll get back to you immediately if you have a change, problem, or question.

I hired Brian and, guess what—he truly does get back to me immediately if I have a change, problem, or question. I've since recommended him to colleagues many times.

1. Joe: Brian, why it is so important to you to respond quickly to customers?
2. Brian: I work hard on responding quickly to my customers. I've been on the other end when I've contacted customer service/support team and it takes days or even weeks before hearing anything back from them. It's a very frustrating thing. So when I started my own business, I made it my goal to respond back to my clients as soon as possible. It reminds the customer that I'm always here for them, and they appreciate that!
3. Joe: How do you fit in that kind of immediate response with the work that you already have on your plate every day?
4. Brian: During business hours I'm constantly on my computer, so I hear and see the notification whenever an e-mail is in my inbox, and I know it's there. I feel like if I don't read it, then I'm just ignoring it and it's not important to me. So I have the mind-set of “every e-mail that comes into my inbox is important to me.”
5. Joe: How important has immediate response been in the success of your business and in continuing to build your business?
6. Brian: Responding quickly to e-mails has been incredibly important in the success of my business. I depend on word-of-mouth referrals. Ninety-five percent of my clients have come by word of mouth. If I'm not doing a good job with my current customers, then they wouldn't share my contact information with their friends/colleagues. I wouldn't get a continual flow of new clients, and my business would hurt from it. I rely on my clients just as much as they rely on me. So I know it's crucial to make my customers happy, and the best way I can make them happy is to always be there for my clients and respond to their e-mails and phone calls whenever they reach out to me.

A New Standard of Performance

An immediate response to customers has become such an expected standard of performance these days that I shake my head in disbelief at those who think that customers will accept anything less. Not long ago I sent an e-mail to a small company that used to provide Internet marketing services for us. The next day (already too long!) I received a reply saying that the person I was trying to contact wouldn't respond to me because he was at a business convention in Philadelphia.

What? Do they not have Internet service in Philadelphia? Is he seriously not checking e-mail for five days? If he's not, did he not make provisions for someone else to handle his customers? And if he didn't do that, did it not occur to him to send his customers advance notice that he'd be unavailable?

I fired the company.

I'm not saying that you can't have a life or that you have to be tied to your customers 24/7 without a break. But I am saying that your business has to. If you're not going to be available to respond to customers, then you've got to make alternate plans to cover it or at the very least let your customers know in advance.

I Loved Them

A big part of my job is to be on the lookout for new companies that look like they're going to be magnetic, with the potential for growth and success. I began hearing a lot about a company that delivered top-quality ingredients with recipes for great gourmet meals to your home.

I was intrigued by this whole new category of upscale meals that you cook yourself, so to get a customer's perspective, I signed up. After the first week's experience with them, I was ready to not only recommend them, but recommend them very enthusiastically. I loved them.

Here's what I wrote after that first delivery:

I don't want to go into doing a commercial so suffice it to say that these guys deliver the goods. Amazing quality food delivered fresh and on time with great recipes that are easy to follow. My daughters and I had a blast cooking together (we let Mom take a break) and I fully intend to stay with this company as a customer getting two meals delivered every Friday unless and until they give me a reason to go elsewhere.

Until I Didn't

The story took a surprising and disappointing turn, however, after my second week's experience. The food didn't show up. Delivery day (Friday) came and went. No delivery.

I called their customer service number. It turns out that on Fridays, one of the two days that they deliver meals to thousands and thousands of customers, their customer service number shuts down at 6 PM Eastern time. Having no one to speak with about my problem, I left a message. No returned call that night. I e-mailed. Nothing. No response.

Knowing this was a new company put together by smart people, I turned to what I was confident would get a response—their Facebook page. I posted about my problem and.…nothing. No response. Then I went for what would surely be my sure thing: Twitter. I tweeted my problem to them. Again, silence.

Now that's a “wow” factor, as in: “Wow, with the potential for delivery problems every Friday night with customers across the United States, they've all gone home.”

Stunning. It was what I consider an epic fail in today's marketplace.

The love was gone.

Too Little, Too Late

Finally, the next day, I received a very nice, very professional e-mail from the company apologizing for their delivery failure. They said that they'd take that meal off my bill, and give me next week's meal free.

It was a classic case of too little, too late. Not only had they literally failed to deliver on a basic expectation (the product), but their response time was abysmal. If they had answered their phone on Friday evening or even responded reasonably quickly to my e-mail, my post on their Facebook page, or my tweets to them, it might have been a different story.

Reality check: You can't be slow to respond to customers today and expect to be competitive.

Another reality check: “Slow” means taking longer than “now.”

Real-Time Response

I'm not talking about an unreasonable expectation on the part of customers. I'm simply talking about a new definition in a new customer reality. Immediate, real-time response has become the new reasonable expectation. Either meet that expectation, or lose customers to those who will.

It used to be that when all else failed in trying to reach a service or product provider, you tweeted. Now it's become the first line of communication for lots of consumers and business-to-business customers.

Entrepreneur magazine ran an article about this new customer reality:

“If you're not listening in social, it's like telling your call center staff to take the next month off,” says Lucas Vandenberg of Fifty & Five, a digital marketing agency. “Twitter is the most real-time tool we have.”

Hyatt Hotels & Resorts has people working around the clock to respond in minutes to social media messaging from customers. “It's replacing calling the front desk for that subset of customers,” says Dan Moriarty, director of digital strategy for Hyatt. “We don't want to pick up the phone and wait for the front desk. We want to tweet and get on with our lives.”

Steven Oddo, co-founder of tour company Walks of Italy, New York & Turkey, posted a tweet while in-flight requesting an earlier connection with Delta Air Lines in Atlanta. Within three minutes he had received a reply “I will be more than happy to place you on stand-by for that flight,” and received a confirmation in less than a minute after that.

Sorry, That Won't Work for Me

I was working with a company that was proud of their 24-hour response promise to customers. I used the punchline from an old joke in telling them, “Sorry, but your 24 hour response time wouldn't work for me as a customer because of where I live.” Someone finally asked, “Where do you live?”

“In the twenty-first century,” I said.

Obviously, it's your call. You're certainly capable of immediate response to customers. Anyone is. If your excuse is that it costs too much money to staff for immediate response, I'll simply say that it costs you much more to not do it. If your excuse is that you're a small or even a one-person business, I'll say: “So am I. But I do it.”

Immediate response to customers, prospects, and partners is something you can start doing now, as soon as you finish reading this sentence.