When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all…
I answered an interesting question today on video.
Why do we only remember bad customer service experiences?
(You can watch the video below)
As I’m sure you already know, bad customer service stands out because of 2 things…
It’s unique
It’s emotionally charged.
You ask a question about your account and the guy tells you to fornicate with farm animals, starts crying, throws his headset down, and quits his shitty call center job right then and there, you’re going to remember it.
Very unique, and you’re either going to be angry about it or find it hilarious, depending on your character.
This works in the positive direction also. Google once sent me a brand new phone for free. I remembered that one.
Most customer service interactions though fall into one of two categories.
Acceptably good enough, or tolerably bad.
You expect one of these two things, so it doesn’t stick out in your memory.
But this leaves out the best possible customer service. Customer experience, really. The stuff that’s totally invisible to most people.
(The stuff that I teach here: https://gumroad.com/l/rkbth/VIP)
The best handled customer problem is always worse than the one that never happens.
So the best thing you can do for your customer service is to (intelligently) make sure most customers never have to contact you at all.
You don’t do this by hiding your contact page and hoping they give up.
You do this by anticipating the most common problems and preventing them before they happen.
You do this by looking at what people ask you about the most, and identifying ways to make it so they don’t have to.
The specifics of this of course depend on your business, but there are some similarities.
It’s the ultimate application of 80/20 to customer service, and one that many people miss.
Why?
Because it doesn’t sound like customer service. This, especially in big businesses, means it often gets ignored.
The Customer Service (capitalized) people think only in terms of how they can improve the customer service. What happens after a customer has a problem.
And the rest of the business thinks that if a customer has a problem or question about something, they can just contact customer service.
Nobody puts the two together, because nobody has the authority to put the two together.
This is where smaller businesses, especially one man shops, have a big advantage.
When both sides are the same person, or when they’re sitting in the same room together, this stuff gets a lot easier.
If you look at it the right way. Many don’t. They just do what everybody else is doing.
And that’s a mistake.
— Mark
