Customer service isn’t about you, it’s about the customer

As a result of this column you and your organization will:

See your customers as they are, not as you wish them to be and have a keen awareness of their needs.
Understand that your customers evaluate their total experience with your company as a whole.
Act like the entire organization is the customer service department, and gain a major competitive advantage.

The customer always acts to satisfy their own interests by seeking what is, in their opinion, the highest quality at the very lowest cost. When it comes to automobiles, at the high end, they select a Rolls- Royce or Bentley. At the lower end they choose between a KIA and Hyundai. Thus, each customer decides what they consider the best value for the lowest price.

They care about themselves, about their desires and their lives. Your success depends on meeting customer needs and desires from their perspective, not yours. You must know them well and understand their real concerns. Here is how!

You need to see your customers as they are, not as you wish them to be. All customers start with an awareness of a need. They then evaluate providers, select one, sort out payment options, purchase and use the product or service, repurchase, (hopefully from you again) and tell their friends how happy they are.The fact is that most organizations break this customer process into unrelated parts that are primarily designed to match company structure. Marketing and sales create awareness, evaluation, and buying decisions. Financial people handle the payables, credit screening, and billing. Procurement, shipping and receiving make sure the delivery and inventory are correct.

However, your customers evaluate their total experience with your company as a whole. They don’t care a lick about who’s in charge of one specific area and they certainly don’t care how or why certain decisions were made. Nevertheless, causing dissatisfaction or inconvenience in just one area jeopardizes the entire relationship.

Your entire organization including outside venders if you use them, is your customer service department, and failing to realize this can create a major competitive disadvantage.

My wife always joked about paying $15 for a CD that had only one song she wanted to hear. She would visit a retail store, sort through the racks and then buy a CD that had about a dozen songs. She then went to the checkout, paid for the CD and came home and played it.

Now, however, she can buy the single song she wants on-line rather than purchasing an entire CD at a store. The familiar profit model of the music business has changed forever and, for my wife, an annoyance of the old model has been eliminated.These customer centric changes have made some music business models less profitable but forged opportunities for other innovative companies like Apple with the iPod. What could change in your business that would give your customer more of what they really want?

To answer that question look closely at those customers who provide the most profit and ask everyone who works for and with you, including research, development, suppliers, sales, marketing, servicing, credit, complaints, repairs, shipping, and technical assistance to help. A team can best describe a customer experiences and will discover how to improve it.

Authors McGrath and MacMillan in Market Busters point out that…

Amazon.com simplified the book-buying experience and even added a way for customers to resell used volumes.
Coinstar Inc. got customers to happily accept 91 cents for every dollar in coins by conveniently installing sorting machines in supermarkets.
Customer service leaps were made when CarsDirect.com decided to assist buyers through the complete process of evaluating and purchasing an auto on-line.
And when the Speedpass was introduced at ExxonMobil, it made the customer service experience more pleasant. Stations using Speedpass gained six percent more market share than other stations.

Outstanding customer service provided by your organization’s service team will cause raving fans to reward you beyond expectations. It’s not about your business. It’s about them!

This article is provided by Joe Murtagh, “The DreamSpeaker™” www.TheDreamSpeaker.com. For keynotes, facilitation, workshops, consulting and questions or or a free report on The 3 Most Common Mistakes Organizations Make, email us at Joe@TheDreamSpeaker.com or call 800-239-0058.

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