How Badly Do You Want to Serve Your Customers?

It is a simple question but sadly one that does not receive the attention it should in every organization: how badly do you want to serve your customers?

Most customer management leaders talk a big game about wanting to drive customer satisfaction, loyalty and experience scores through the roof. They talk about combining customer-centricity with cost-efficiency as they produce a better multi-channel experience for their buyers.

Yet they often leave a gap when it comes to actually fighting for the mere opportunity to provide customer support for the audience. Bombarding customers with social media campaigns and marketing messages? That is no problem. Improving training and adding software to make the calls your reps receive more efficient and navigable? Obviously.

But actually going out of the way to provide the meaningful service customers, deep down, require to develop a true sense of loyalty for and satisfaction with the brand? As if.

In thinking about which brands have reached out to me proactively, my mind, unequivocally and quite sadly, settled exclusively on online sportsbooks. Whenever a big fight or playoff game approaches, I receive a "check-in" call making sure everything is good with my account.

When a new version of iOS releases, Apple does not call to make sure the upgrade went smoothly. When one of my stock holdings is about to report earnings, no one from my online brokerage makes sure I’m strategically prepared. Only the online sportsbooks seem willing to make the proactive effort.

Obviously, the comparison seems horrifically flawed. The sportsbooks are not actually checking in to provide customer service—they are trying to coax me to bet money on upcoming sporting events. They are selling to me, not serving me.

However, those inclined to point out the incongruity between the sportsbook example and the Apple example are, in effect, underscoring exactly what is wrong with the customer service culture in so many organizations: it is not seen as a direct pathway to dollars.

If you, as a leader within your organization, found out your telephone sales reps were not calling leads and/or not following-up with existing clients to promote up-sell, cross-sell and re-book opportunities, you would not be happy—you would be watching opportunities to drive revenue get flushed down the toilet. That same mentality should apply to customer service—if your organization does not seize every opportunity to alleviate potential concern and keep customers happy, you absolutely should fear that money is being tossed out the window.

This, of course, does not mean every organization should be proactively calling the entirety of its customer directory every time a minor product change or upgrade is planned. Frankly, since excessive interaction with brands can be annoying, many customers would actually see such over-the-top proactivity as a negative.

It does, however, mean that organizations need to approach customer service as a pivotal value driver, rather than as a "worst case scenario" or "only by necessity" offering. Customers are constantly evaluating their experiences with products, and there is no unbreakable rule regarding when and where they make the determination about how loyal they will be to the brand. As a result, organizations cannot assume that the only customers who need to be re-convinced of the brand’s value, let alone wowed by it, are those who actually send through an email or dial the call center.

All customers, whether passive and complacent or active and hostile, care about the brand experiences they receive. Loyalty, therefore, can be created or destroyed every time a customer engages with a brand and its products—not simply when the product calls customer support and gets either a helpful or unhelpful response. If companies take for granted the fact that their customers who do not complain or seek support unequivocally "get" the value, they are missing out on major opportunities to stress the full scope of their customer experience.

Some may dismiss the notion of delivering a proactive, 24/7 "experience" as idealistic fluff—most customers, they argue, only care about customer service when they need it. True customer management leaders, of course, know that to be false—with the economy making customers more obsessive about value and new media removing barriers to customer acquisition, now is not the time to take customer satisfaction for granted.

But even beyond that "idealism" is the simple fact that many customers who need service do not properly communicate their issues through the proper channels. Even though the miscommunication (or lack of communication) is often more the fault of the customer than the brand, when that customer reflects on his experience, he will wonder why the company did not easily resolve his issue. Fault or no fault, it is the brand itself that suffers.

Case-in-point: Many Call Center IQ users are undoubtedly familiar with an occasional issue on our Q&A board. Every so often, CCIQ’s Q&A section receives customer support inquiries from users who, for some reason, felt they were speaking directly to a brand. CCIQ has seen requests to cancel and change subscriptions to publications like Redbook and Better Homes and Gardens, issues with airlines like Southwest and inquiries about sewing materials from a variety of fabric producers.

CCIQ absolutely does not work to attract this sort of traffic; it seems to come when people see AdSense/AdWords/organic search results for customer service attached to their searches for the customer service departments of different brands. Not especially tech-savvy, these users follow the trail to our Q&A pages, believing they are communicating with the brand itself all the while.

Prior to deleting the questions, CCIQ does its best to address these customers personally, but for a number of reasons (they put the wrong email in, they don’t respond via the contact details they provided, etc), such communication is not always possible. That means that some customers may wonder why the brand is not responding or, worse, even conclude that their issue has already been resolved. If someone "cancels" a magazine subscription on CCIQ and is then charged by Redbook, the customer might conclude that Redbook is cheating them out of money.

More often than not, the issue is technically the customer’s fault—it is not as if Redbook goes out of its way to drive customer support traffic to CMIQ. But the customer is not going to simply accept blame, especially if vagueness, ambiguity or confusion on the part of the brand is what led to the misdirection.

If the brand does not locate and resolve these issues the brand’s reputation—and customer satisfaction level—ultimately suffers.

This re-emphasizes the extent to which a passive company can be a struggling company. Waiting for the customer to reach out before deeming something a problem might seem like the best idea from an efficiency standpoint, but it is not always what customers want.

In order to give them what they want and truly better the customer experience, the company has to be willing to bring service to the customer. This might not mean bombarding customers with pre-emptive phone calls, but it will mean monitoring conversation about the products and determining what is making customers tick and what potential issues might arise before developing strategies to nip those issues in the bud. It will mean proactively showing the brand that it will be able to help if something goes wrong, making customers feel "safe" and confident that they were right to buy the brand’s products.

Real customer service—the kind that generates the satisfaction and loyalty that turns into revenue—is not about responding to customers. It is about serving them and often requires more than a well-spoken phone rep or easy-to-use IVR system.

It requires a strict subscription to the belief that if you do not show you are unequivocally there for your customers, you are confirming your willingness to let that customer fall by the wayside.