Try Making Your Customers Content
Zappos has a record for the longest customer service call with 8 hours and 23 minutes. Elon Musk responds to customer complaints directly on Twitter. And then there is this motel that's not satisfied with anything less than excellent:
Why set yourself up for failure? Who the fuck is going to LOVE ❤️ 💕 staying at a middle-tier motel in a sorta dodgy part of Toronto? How about just striving for adequate service, no egregious fuck-ups, and reasonable expectations? pic.twitter.com/CFXkdi66ye
— DHH (@dhh) July 6, 2018
Amazing customer service stories are probably great material for anecdotes but that’s about it. For the majority of companies, amazing customer service doesn't actually make your customers any more loyal. At least according to the research done by Dixon, Freeman, and Toman.
It turns out that what really matters to your customers is your product, brand, value, and keeping boring promises like "We promise not to screw up!"
Why is that? Why do we talk so much about amazing customer service but patronize businesses that offer very few wow feelings for us?
We simply love consistency and great value over random occurrences of excellence. And bend-over-backwards customer service can endanger those two things so dear to us.
If you instruct your customer service to "exceed customer expectations" they won't really understand what you mean by it. Some of the employees will mismanage their time and budget. Some of them will stress out or focus on the flashy, exciting customer experience instead of the boring, more important one.
Don't think you can just throw around cool one-liners or stories to your employees without providing them guidelines for concrete actions.
Those one-liners by themselves can make a customer leave your company.