Delighted Customers?

How does your company provide superior customer service?

We have all heard the phrase, “The Customer is King.” But do we all truly believe that? I’m not so sure. Several times I have participated in sales presentations and heard the account manager say things to the buyer like:

We can’t do that.

Calm down.

I don’t know.

It won’t work.

We have to do a better job of solving our customers’ problems or someone else will. We need to say, “That’s a great question. Let me check with Marketing and R&D to see how we can help you.” We need to anticipate our customers’ objections and questions and be prepared for that moment.

Many companies do an excellent job with customer service. Earning 100% accuracy on criteria including order fill rate, on time delivery, correct pricing, accurate billing and so on can be extremely challenging.

“The truck is stuck in a storm in Colorado.” “The truck got hit by a train.” “Sales forgot to enter the promotion code.” “The product was mislabeled.” “We ran out of packaging.” “They ordered the wrong item.” “That’s not my job.”

One of my favorite bosses, Frank Perdue, was sitting in on a meeting and we were rattling off statistics where sales were up 20%, profits were up 20%, brand awareness was  a whopping 95% and customer service accuracy was meeting plan of 95%. He wanted to know how come our customer service accuracy plan was anything less than 100%. He then asked a simple question, “Who here wants 95% of their salary?

The customer is indeed king. We love our customers. We exert a lot of energy getting more customers. But, do we spend enough effort keeping the customers we have? According to a study by Flowtown, the cost of acquiring new customers is six to seven times more than keeping existing customers. We should do everything we can to achieve customer service level of 100% resulting in delighted customers.

How does your company provide superior customer service?”