This past July I talked about how Dave Carroll’s “United Breaks Guitars” YouTube post had brought new strength and power to consumer complaints against corporations’ customer dis-service. The original song/video has had over 5 million views, and is now available on iTunes. This is an astounding amount of bad publicity, damaging mainstream media press coverage, and negative word-of-mouth marketing for United Airlines.

Yesterday, August 19, Huffington Post reported that troubadour Carroll has, as promised, released his second of three songs/videos about his year-long saga of trying to get United Airlines to pay for the repairs to his Taylor guitar, broken by UAL baggage handlers at Chicago’s O’Hare airport.

The lesson to learn here is that while the benefits of good customer service might take a while to become apparent, bad customer service gets noticed – talked about, and publicized – immediately, and widely, and repeatedly. Businesses spend trillions of dollars every year in all kinds of marketing programs and tactics to gain customers. And everyone claims that they understand the principle that it is easier and less expensive to keep a good customer than to constantly find new ones.

That said, then why do businesses persist in giving crappy customer care? Today’s media-savvy consumers cannot be brushed off as minor annoyances. They have global reach. As Carroll has shown, any positive results that a company might have been gained from all that marketing spend can be quickly negated in one stroke. Have you seen the United Breaks Guitars t-shirts people are wearing to the airports?

UAL will be spending marketing money on damage control for months to come. You and your business can avoid a similar image catastrophe by making positive, responsive, customer service an integral part of your marketing plan and business operations plan.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software

Tags: customer care, customer service, Dave Carroll, Marketing
Posted on August 21st, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Lots of things can happen when a job is done well. Here are a few:

1. Personal satisfaction
2. Sales for your company (or yourself)
3. Preservation of the natural “buying-selling” ecosystem
4. Unsolicited praise from your client base

This particular post is about number four. Every once in a while, a user of your product or service might find themselves so overwhelmed by the quality you provide that they decide to take matters into their own hands.

It happened to Email Center Pro the other day. One of the service’s users ( Jennifer Haubein of Websites 2 Grow) decided that telling us how impressed she was no longer sufficed. She wanted to tell others in her circle of influence.

Here’s what she said:

And here’s why she said it (in other words, here are some simple rules for soliciting unsolicited praise. Please note that simple doesn’t mean easy.):

1. Customer Service: If this sounds cliche to you, then you’re not managing it correctly. It’s not a cliche, it’s the bottom line. Customer service can look very different depending on the situation at hand. At all times, however, keep the customer in mind. Zappos did; they just sold for nearly $1 billion. I’m just saying.

2. Customer Support: The customer is using your product/service, you’re meeting their service needs and then something goes wrong. Do you hide and distribute the blame? Or do you step up and meet their need at every turn? (Please note that this can blur quite appropriately with customer service.)

3. A High-Quality Service/Product: This speaks for itself — somewhat. You certainly can’t get away with a sub-par product or an inconsistent service, but just know that even good (rather than amazing) products/services can enjoy success if attention is paid to the other numbers in this list.

4. Did I Mention Customer Service?: This can’t be understated. Be remarkable. It works. The most uplifting emails and calls received at Palo Alto Software are by those who were even more impressed with our service and support than with our product.

Happy soliciting!

Jason Gallic
Product Manager for Email Center Pro

Tags: customer service, Email Center Pro, evangelism
Posted on August 12th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

As part of your Customer Service, your team must pay attention to the voice mail messages of your customers. Almost all of us have answering machines or voice mail capabilities on our home phones, office phones, and cellular phones. And we all leave some kind of outgoing message on those systems, sometimes humorous, sometimes dull and stilted, most often direct and giving the basic facts: you have reached *name*, leave a message after the tone and we’ll call you back.

Now here’s the question. When you place the call and are connected to voice mail, how often do you tune out the message while waiting for the tone? There’s the point. For many of us, the voice mail’s greeting message is so routine we ignore it completely. And there we show our disrespect for our customers. And in doing so, harm our own businesses.

As an example, not too long ago we received a message on our home voice mail. It was from a lawyer, we’ll call him Mr. A. Turney. Mr. A. Turney was leaving a message for Mr. Cheung about a current legal issue, and needed Mr. Cheung to return his call right away. To me this was an obvious miskeying of the phone number. I figured Mr. A. Turney would call Mr. Cheung the next day when he hadn’t heard from him.

The next day we had another message from Mr. A. Turney, telling Mr. Cheung, in a slightly irritated voice, to return his call right away. Now, this was kind of funny, since at that time, I was in the habit of telling jokes on our outgoing message, and my voice has a rather slight Pacific Northwest accent, with minor hints of my Upper Midwest Scandinavian background. And to tell the truth, I doubt very much that Mr. Cheung would be telling jokes on his business phone voice mail.

The third day came, and to my surprise Mr. A. Turney left us another message. He was getting quite exasperated. I can just see him, sitting at his desk, pressing redial on his phone, and busily multi-tasking, writing his torts and retorts, while cluelessly ignoring my joke for the third time. Now, I was getting a little irritated myself. So that evening I called Mr. A. Turney’s office and told HIS voice mail that he’d been leaving messages for Mr. Cheung at the wrong phone number all week. Then I changed our outgoing message to tell a somewhat unflattering lawyer joke. Unfortunately, I didn’t have Mr. Cheung’s number, or I would have called him to let him know that his lawyer was severely lacking in attention to detail.

Thursday night we returned home, and sure enough Mr. A. Turney had left yet another message for Mr. Cheung. Obviously he didn’t listen to our message with the ribald lawyer joke, or at least he didn’t deign to mention it, nor had he listened to his OWN voice mail messages, telling him he was barking up the wrong telephone pole. But wouldn’t you have thought he’d have figured out that something was wrong after almost a week of unreturned calls about a pending legal issue?

Here are a few things to consider in your Customer Service contacts with VoiceMail:

• If you are a business, use a business-like outgoing greeting on your voice mail, including your business name.
• When you, a Customer Care Team member, call someone and you get sent to voice mail, listen to the message. Don’t dismiss the message content out of hand. There is good information there. You might find that the person you want is out of the office for a week. Or that they have moved or left the company. You might find a different number to call. Or you might discover you are calling the wrong number.
• If you promised you would return a call to a customer, follow through on that promise. Your customer is waiting for your call. Leave the pertinent information on their voice mail, and if possible, call them back, later, to confirm that they got your message.
• If the voice mail greeting you encounter is a non sequitur, it should be a clear hint that perhaps you have miskeyed the number, or perhaps been given an incorrect number by your customer. In that case you should put in a little extra effort to contact them by email, or look them up in the phone book.
• If you persist in leaving messages on an incorrect voice mail you disserve your current customer, and you’re almost certain to alienate a potential new customer. I know that I won’t be going to Mr. A. Turney for my legal work. He didn’t listen to me before when he thought I was his client…why would I believe he’d listen to me if I truly was?

Show your customers that you respect them, and value your communications with them. Listen to what they have to say.

p.s. I’ve not received a voice mail from Mr. A. Turney recently. Probably Mr. Cheung hired a new lawyer since Mr. A. Turney was obviously ignoring his legal needs because Mr. A. Turney never called him back.

Tags: communication, customer service, news, telephone messages, voice mail
Posted on July 27th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Several weeks ago, Tim Berry wrote a very interesting blog about respecting the meaning of words, and how difficult it can be when the parties in a conversation use the same words differently.

Tim was writing specifically about terms used in accounting and business planning when he wrote:

This problem of definitions drives some people crazy, and it makes me very uncomfortable. It’s not just trying to make trouble on my part. I seem old-fashioned and inflexible when I fall back on the more established, standard definitions of the words and phrases some people want to give their own special meaning to.

I couldn’t help relating this to my experience in customer service, where this comes up quite often. The most frequent scenario is when a customer calls and tells us they can’t download their software. After troubleshooting for a few minutes, often we determine that they’re actually not downloading at all, but installing using a CD.

photo by flickr user timparkinson

Now, to the customer, the difference between the two is just semantics. They don’t care what we call the process. They just want the program on their computer, and we can call it installing, downloading, or hocus pocusing as long as they can start writing their plan when it’s done. It’s perfectly understandable: they don’t want a vocabulary lesson when they call us, they just want their software up and running.

But to the customer service or technical support representative, it’s not semantics at all. We need to know what the customer is actually trying to do before we can help them, because the solutions to downloading problems are quite different than the solutions to CD installations.

When we’re not speaking the same language, support is difficult. Or rather, when we are speaking the same language, but using its words to mean completely different things it’s like there are two different dialects being used. We’re sharing words but not necessarily definitions. Both sides have to acknowledge this in order to actually communicate effectively.

We’re truly not trying to be difficult when we ask you, the customer, a lot of questions. Or when we say “Oh, you don’t need an activation number, you’ve just lost your serial number.” Our intention is not to correct you, it’s to determine exactly what needs to be done and to assist you as efficiently as we can.

Because after all — your success is our success.

Jay Snider
Palo Alto Software

Tags: customer service
Posted on July 7th, 2009 | 3 Comments »

I didn’t say it, Chris Brogan did – because he’s a smart guy. Actually what he said was this: “Customer service isn’t a chore. It’s the new PR” and it’s the truth, the public face of your company – which most likely is your customer service/customer care department is as important and as key to your survival as your PR.

So why do so many companies get it wrong?

Zappos.com is a well known example of a company that puts customer service before everything.  Our Vice President of Product Development, Cale Bruckner, could point you to a fly fishing company, Elkhorn Rod and Reel and how they made him happy about a question he had on his brand new reel. Or how about one of the most famous stories of them all- The Nordstrom’s “Tire return” story.

Good customer service doesn’t necessarily mean out of pocket. You don’t have to offer free shipping,  send free products or accept a return on a product you don’t even sell. Sometimes good customer service is remembering your repeat customers by name, it’s letting them know the shirt they are contemplating on buying will be going on sale the very next day, and sometimes it’s just a smile and a have a nice day.

Whatever it is, it’s noticed, and that person will become an evangelist and that evangelist will tell his fellow evangelists and you can see where I’m going from here.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Tags: customer service
Posted on December 1st, 2008 | No Comments »

We work really hard, here at Palo Alto Software, to make sure our software works right – not just on one operating system or setup, but on all the possible configurations we support. We’ve got two full-time testers sitting right next to the developers who write the code, gleefully pointing out any bugs they find. You know, just to keep the programmers on their toes.

But even the best products can have problems, whether it’s a package that gets broken in delivery, or a design flaw that makes your knees hit the steering wheel on that new-fangled bike.

The good news is, these frustrated customers can become your best word of mouth.

How? Great customer service should be an opportunity to market your company.

Read our latest Global Entrepreneurship Week article on Bplans.com discussing customer service as a flaw or opportunity.

Tags: customer service, Marketing, service
Posted on November 18th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

If you have a question or a technical issue with a product that Palo Alto Software produces, you can call us. It’s true. You can pick up the phone and dial 800-229-7526 and get right to a real live person. You can talk to any of our sales or technical support team. We don’t have a complicated phone tree. We don’t have you press a series of buttons to direct you to the right department, you call in and you’ll talk to a person who can direct you to the right department in a matter of moments.

Don’t want to talk to us directly? That’s ok. You can chat with us. You can go on our website and click on the Live Chat button and get a live person answering your questions. If the chat isn’t open, because we go home to our families at night, then an email with your question is sent and the next morning it has first priority to be answered.

These people work right here, in the Palo Alto Software office, within shouting reach of the developers, marketing department and upper management. There’s never a single moment that the team isn’t overheard by the entire company. Yeah, we’re that involved in the happiness of our customers.

So, still not interested in chat or phoning? That’s ok, you can email us. We use our own dogfood here, Email Center Pro. It’s the best way to make sure every email coming into our company is handled quickly and competently. Every email is answered within a 24 business hour turn around, but more than likely you’ll get an answer by the end of that work day. You might even get an answer from one of the team after hours or on the weekend. Not because it’s required, but because the team has a commitment to making sure people looking for help are answered.

Let me say that again. They have a commitment to making sure any customer reaching out to us is heard and responded to.

I’m telling you this because when I run into a company that literally makes me go around in circles to find technical support answers and tells me that sure I can call them for help if I give them $30 dollars to get the phone number first… I get frustrated.

And I have to tell you, a frustrated customer is a customer that won’t evangelize your product. They won’t return to get the newest version either. At least this customer won’t.

I know this isn’t a new subject here on the BIG blog, but I feel I have the responsibility to point it out when I see it. Good customer service isn’t hard to give. It’s actually a lot easier than you might think. And it’s vital. It’s so important. It’s the difference between success and the “going out of business” sign.

Good customer service is customer retention. It’s repeat business.

It’s your reputation.

Make sure it’s a priority in your business.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Pssst. Have you signed up for the Back to the Fundamentals webinar? Time’s running out, don’t miss your chance.
November 17th, 2008 at 9 a.m. PST

Tags: customer service, grow your business, palo alto software
Posted on November 13th, 2008 | 2 Comments »

A few weeks ago I blogged about customer service and I relayed an experience I had at the Eugene Track and Field Olympic Finals with Bank Of America. They were a sponsor and had a booth, and apparently were treating non-customers better than customers. Much to my amazement, on Friday I got a call from a customer service rep who had found my blog post and wanted to apologize for my bad experience. Can you believe it? It has given me a new-found respect for a large institutionalized bank. What a nice touch to personally reach out to me and apologize. I did not even contact them. Who knew that my blog posts would serve to help me get better served as a customer?

I want to commend Bank of America for spending time understanding new media, and reaching out to customers through this medium. Now I am wondering whether someone at BofA will begin following me on Twitter? I think that would just be too much!

Sabrina Parsons aka Mommy CEO

www.emailcenterpro.com

Tags: customer service
Posted on July 15th, 2008 | No Comments »

Here are another two stories about the importance of good customer service.

I’m heading back to Illinois to move the last of my mother’s furniture from her newly sold house to her new place in Ohio.

We were searching online for moving van/truck rentals and price estimates. One place we looked was Penske.com. The next day we received an email from Penske, following up on our inquiry and asking why we hadn’t booked with them. The email gave us a toll-free phone number and a promise of a discount.

I called them back and the customer care rep helped me make the reservation. Gave me the discount from the email, and a Web discount, checked on the return location, confirmed times and the whole lot. In all we saved over $175 over the competitor’s best rate.

Now, compare this with the tale of my Physical Therapist. She went to the local Eugene Honda dealer to buy a new hybrid sedan. She was a loyal Honda customer coming back for another car. The salesman she was dealing with showed her the car. The color was not even close to the one she’d ordered. After badgering her a bit he walked off to do some other business.

While she waited, thinking he was going to return, another salesman harangued her with “You’re only buying the hybrid for the gas mileage. What does it matter what color it is?”

Hey, even the car company founded by Henry Ford (of “you can have any color you want as long as it is black” fame) realized early on that customers wanted cars with colored paint, and they wanted the color they liked.

Well, my Physical Therapist was so angry at her treatment that she chose to drive an hour to Salem to a different Honda dealership to buy a car in a color she liked.

Here we see again the difference that customer service can make to your business. In one case we have a good program that followed up a contact, and with a friendly and knowledgeable phone representative, clinched a sale for the company.

In the second case the badgering, condescending, and dismissive sales staff lost what started out as a sure deal of $25,000+. Now, maybe $25K is a throwaway deal to these guys, but many businesses can’t afford to cavalierly lose returning customers.

Steve Lange
Palo Alto Software, Inc.

Tags: customer care, customer service, lost sales, sales
Posted on May 7th, 2008 | 1 Comment »