The Forgotten Customer, The Employee

We often talk about the customer experience in terms of those who make a financial commitment to our business in the terms of purchase power, life cycles, renewable financial resources etc., But we fail to realise that there is a significant financial investment made by those who work for us or those whom we manage. It isn't measured in direct sales revenue or in terms which are reported on any financial statement, but the investment made by these employees into the success structure of any business or department is of definite note. When working with clients and their businesses, or when I worked as a manager, there was always a separate report that evaluated this investment.

A managers success isn't because of what he accomplished, but is measured in the success of those who served/worked under him. Employee satisfaction can have a positive or negative impact on the bottom line, balance sheet, or it can have a positive impact increasing net worth for the directors or owner.

How do you make the employee experience one where they want to be where they are? It should be addressed in the same way that you do the customer experience. There is a brand promise made by you, the company, the product or manager that always needs to be fulfilled in order to build a trust relationship. Such trust fulfillment generates exceptional employee performance, reduced fraud and and instills a brand pride into their everyday work experience.

Such pride can produce as much as 30% increase in overall performance and revenue generation. If you want to out perform during a financial downturn or recession maybe you should be looking inward in order to grow outward.

As always we invite your comments and insight.

Your Customers Worth

We often forget the real value of our customers and the long term impact that they have on our business operations. In most businesses, unfortunately, the focus is solely on the individual sale that is attained within a specific time of reference. Businesses focus strictly on the point of sale for the most part and not on the customer.

What we seem to forget as business operators, managers, etc is that the customer represents on going income and in most cases the customer life cycle can extend far into the future. If the customer recieves expectation fulfillment from the experience that they have with your business, your services or the product/products that you offer, there is roughly a 70% chance that that particular customer will return and make another purchase of a similar kind. The length of time between purchases would depend on your products life cycle and the customers rate of use.

It has been my experience that when the customer returns they ussually add to the list of product or services that they originally purchased and broaden the customers buying circle. So the question here is how are you managing your customers experiences and in what way do you evaluate the worth of that customer.

In recessions and down turns a customers loyalty to a particular brand, product or business is what brings a business through the rough times. It is the percieved experience of any particular customer that builds that loyalty. Did you fullfill your brand promise. Maybe this should be the focus that a business uses when setting up their recession survival strategies?

We invite your comments as always.

In Times of Recession

It is amazing that when times get tough in our businesses we seem to create the very behaviors that bring our businesses further down even to the point of closing the doors.

The "Glooms" come out to play, we loose focus of our primary goals, and we spend all our time in trying to find the magic key to deliver us from the Doom Gods. Worst of all we turn away from the two greatest factors in any business or economic turn around, our employees and our customers. It's amazing how businesses in developed countries panic and loose control of their instincts and their self control.

I often travel to underdeveloped countries and what I find are people who thrive in adversity and economies that are in constant flux, and that's mostly in a recessionary down turn. But what I also find are people, who in spite of it all, pay attention to detail and never ever forget the importance of focusing on the customer. The businesses in these countries and communities, whether large or small, know that their very existence is tied to the customers or potential customers perception of their products, service and how the customer is treated as an individual. Perhaps we should learn from this.

The customer's needs will always be there no matter what the economy may be doing, and they will always be looking for ways to meet their needs and solve their problems either in a business to business environment, or as individual consumers. What sets a successful business apart from the rest in an adverse business environment isn't government bailouts, or uncle John's bank account, but the way they recognize and deal with their customers and employees everyday.

In a time when everyone is looking for answers maybe if we learn to use the answers we already have we just may find that success is not just a term for economic upturns. If you want to survive the tough times pay attention to your best friends, your customers and they will always be there to take care of you.

I'm Back

For so many reasons, for none of which I'm really sure of, I have not been actively posting and for that I really do apoligize. But no matter the cause for my absense, I am back, and with a new mission and a re-energized passion for the love of creating great successes in the world and lives of owners, managers and employees of today's businesses. Most of all, for those who want to take their businesses beyound the limited realms of conventional bisness wisdom(?), and who have realised that it is the customer that holds the keys to their success.

The vigor and sustaining life of a business is found in the un-measureable facets of goodwill, smiles, and the unseen passions of those who care more about the people they serve than in the selling of a product or service. And it is to this cause and purpose that I will again write and share the knowledge that I have gained in this area. So Bon appetite, please feel free to endulge in the deluctable servings of the what is the great must for developing a great and successfull business, true customer care.

Please feel free to add your comments

Defining Customer Service

How do you define customer service? There are indeed many ways to define customer service, but they are generally divided in to two categories. Customer service as defined by a particular business and customer service as it is defined by the customer.

In a business context the cost of customer service is defined as an expense and is often limited to basic services in terms of cost allocated to the cost of sales. In other words it is a function of the sales cycle or sales process most often defined by the marketing department. Even in the event that there is customer service representation the terms and policies are still determined in terms that support the over all sales cycle. Even in manufacturing or in service based companies this is true.

In terms of the customer experience, customer service is defined by the customer. Now, true every customer is different, but the service can be defined by customer segmentation or groups. When the customer defines the terms of service it is independent of the sales process and is need based with a focus shifting away from the sales cycles and sales drivers.

Which is better? It depends on the focus of the business and organisation that uses it, but if you are truly customer centered you will define your customer service and subsequent policies by the later. This applies to all sizes of businesses and organizations.

The customer fulfillment cycle is what really drives long term customer loyalty, increased sales cycles and long term increased valuation.

How are u defining customer service is it bringing you closer to your customers or pushing you farther away?

As always we invite your comments and insights

As always we invite you to share your comments and feedback.

It's not Just Customer Service

The old year is passing and with it one of the most maddening weeks of the year for most retail businesses regardless of the country. For B2B businesses it’s a week of slow downs, key people on vacation and year end quotas hanging in jeopardy. The auditors, business owners, and accountants are cranking it up trying to get a head start on closing out the month and year end books, and on top of that a barrage of bargain hunting customers are trying the patience of the most forgiving of customer reps and clerks.

To help in this maddening world of business it is still very important to focus on the customer. Why? First of all they do pay the bills. It is in the customer that we find the reason to keep the doors open and hope for our companies future. With this in mind the idea of customer service isn't enough. Being polite, smiling, gracious, courteous, helpful and a host of other adjectives aren’t going to bring the house down. Customer service is only a part of a larger picture as well as is marketing, and branding. They are all pieces of the "Customer Experience".

It is in the creating and maintaining of the customers experience, both direct and indirect, that will bring success to any business or company. Not in any given process, but in all aspects of any given business that create some defining impact on the customer. So, in the New Year to come, let’s move beyond the realm of customer service. Let us move into the creating and management of the customer experience. It is here that loyalty develops and the true return on any business or companies capital is made.

We are just a few days away from the reflecting on the past year performances, which should be reflected in our consideration of our coming New Years resolutions. Let’s resolve to remake the way we do business and deal with our customers. One that will define us and separate us from the pack. Let us look beyond the realm of customer service to truly serve our clients/customers and expand our horizons for the year to come.

As always we invite your comments.

It's Happened

We have been inducted into the "Incredible Hall of Acclaim" . This is awarded to people who take writing about customer service seriously and contribute to the on going piles of information that every business owner and manager should read but seldom gets around to it.

We have been inducted along with the likes of Seth Goodin, one of the worlds great marketers. Thank you Maria Palma the founder of . "The Customers Always Right" blog and of the "Incredible Hall of Acclaim" award.

Of course we will wear this distinction with pride and honor.

We welcome your comments as always.

Carnival of Customer Service

In the area of customer srvice , true customer service, the path is filled with land mines and road blocks and of course the misleading phylosophies of customer srvice out there that come from many of the self proclaimed gurus of customer service and marketing. However, I have come to respect and share many different views with Glenn Ross over at Allbusiness.com His insights are solid and timely.

Glenn this week is hosting "The Carnival on Customer Service". Sharing many various points of value from his insight and those of others. Stop in, take a look, it's worth the effort. There is much to learn in the customer service arena and The Carnival is a good place to start.

As always you are invited to leave your comments

What Do Customers Expect? - Customer Service

In the on going battle to bring business from the dark ages into the 21st century of customer centered services the defining of what a customer wants has come down to the tug of war between the conceptual idealization of the marketing departments and consultants and that of the customers themselves.

Even in the most forthright of customer service blogs and articles, customer service ideologist have been mislead by the marketing world into identifying marketing concepts as customer service ideologies and perspectives, even to the point of re-labeling traditional marketing jargon to quack like a duck, however underneath the quack there ain’t no waddle. Businesses need to be careful of being mislead in the application of policies that are selfserving and hollow pulling them away from the purpose of customer service and their customer's (market segment)expectations.

It is of the greatest importance that businesses understand the direct relationship between customer service and customer expectations in the terms of the customer not in the terms of the marketing traditionalist. Until businesses can do that and understand how to integrate this "customer perspective" into their marketing, branding, sales and policy development, they will never win the hearts of their potential customers and loyalty as elusive as it is will always be a fleeting fancy.

Soul proprieters and small enterprize companies need to pay even closser attention to how they center their over all planning strategies and growth focus.

We invite any and all comments.

Customer Expectations

There is much to be said about what your customer’s expectations are and what are the customer’s expectations as defined by a given business? Meikah at Customer Service, Global Watch has started to take a few swings at this. It’s worth the reading.

However, what she has signaled out is that the customer expectation from a business perspective is defined by good marketing. Is this wrong? Actually its ok as long as you are careful to meld what the customers really expect from a business or product with the business defined perceptions. In the list cited by Meikah the focus is on creating emotional triggers that move the customer to making a purchase.


This is good right? Yes and no, in most all cases. It appeals to the emotional instincts of the buyer but doesn't really address expectations and often, more than not, leaves the customer empty. Think about it, how many times have u gone into a store or restaurant and felt let down by the expected experience, or bought a product and were left holding less than what your expectations were. And this applies to B2B businesses and products or services as well.

Perhaps defining expectations should be done differently.

We invite your comments as always

What Do Your Employees Reflect

I walked into a small shop yesterday that sold a variety of things to do with gaming, computers etc, but this could have been any store large or small by the way. I walked in and looked around and there were no labeled isles or shelves or sections to help in a self service environment, so I went to identify/find a clerk in order to inquire about some specific products. There were perhaps 15 other customers in the store and it was impossible to tell them from the floor clerk or other staff, if in fact there were any working the sales area.

Next I went over to the checkout counter and there sitting behind the counter were two employees hard at work on what seemed to be there lunch and immersed in a deep conversation focused on topics other than what there job discription reflected. I stood there for upward of 2 to 3 minutes before they looked at me. They then very sharply said "talk to the floor clerk. We have one". I said I don't see one out there would you point him out to me. At this the young lady said "he's in the corner go look", and turned back to her food as though i wasn't worthy of her attention. Hmmm, I thoughtabout this for a moment, and of course I couldn't let it go, so I forced them to stop eating and answer my question. Needless to say, I didn't buy anything and left the store.

In reflection I concluded that the store had no customer service policy let along standardization for employee behavior nor did the owner/manager care about how the customers felt about their erperience while shopping in the store. Employees should never eat at the customer cvounter or anywhere in the common work area for that matter, especially in front of the customers, it's first of all rude and it sends to your customers a message that says they are not important. All employees should of had well marked name tags or clothing or both in order to be identified easily. Third, and last in this observation is that the employees needed to be trained in how to address the customers and how to put the customer first. especially in the manner in which they addressed and answered questions.

The sad thing here is that this situation is prevalent in most small B2C (consumer bassed) businesses. It also happens in B2B more often than you would like to think, especially with office staff when a customer walks in unexpectedly or calls to trying to reach his contact point. These behaviors and lack of training have explicit negative reflections on the business and the customer’s perception of that business and its brand.

We invite your open comments as always.

Customer Expectations vs Business Policy

It never stops to amaze me how businesses especially small ones develop business policies without relating their outcomes to direct customer service results. For instance, I walked into a hardware store the other day and wanted to make $145.00 purchase. No big deal right? Well it certainly ended up as one. They don't take credit cards, they only cash or debit cards.

Never the less I pursued this with the store manager. First, I didn't bring enough cash. Second, it is a business deductible charge so I wanted it on my Visa card. Well the company policy was set up so that the hardware store would not have to loose that extra small percentage of a purchase that credit card companies charge for the privilege of them bringing more business into the store. This was a "Big mistake", especially since their competition takes Visa and other cards. The manager offered no recourse, not even a feed back channel to higher decision makers, which was another big mistake in the creation of a good customer experience.


Such non customer centered decisions force customers to comply with a company policy that is not customer friendly creating bad feelings in the customer. Such Business centered policies pushes business to a competing business thus loosing a potential revenue stream. "True Customer Service" meets the needs of the customer including formatting business policies to enhance that customer service experience. Needles to say, I went to the competitors and bought with my Visa. Hey! guys, earning 100% of nothing is still 0%. 90% or 60% of something is still money in the bank and a happy customer.

As always we invite your comments and ideas.

Its all in the way They see it

Fist I want to thank all those who patiently returned time after time even without consistent material being here to read. I had been quite ill and this blog was somewhat out of reach. So Thank you and I'm back.

As business owners and managers we get so caught up in what we do every day that we forget one simple and very basic principle. It's not how we see the business or how the marketers claim they not the needs of the focus market or how much the sales people think they own the customer. It is in reality how the customer sees us.

Ever have a conversation with someone and no matter what we say they think they no what we will say next or they are off in some mind zone not even connected to what we are saying. Well in a recent poll the findings show that a very large segment of customers in B2B and the B2C retail markets think that is how they are treated by small and large businesses.

Maybe we should not look at how much we build the team, but in how good our listening skills are.

As always we invite your comments.

Some Days Just Dont Add Up

In the grand scheme of things sometimes what we do seems quite insignificant. Maybe its because we felt that we were in the drivers seat and the world was ours or perhaps we just get to much of ourselves being the all important manager or the owner of a flourishing business. It really doesn't matter how, but it does matter that when we do we dont lose site of the the fact that no mater how important we feel we are that5 we still realise that the customer is still more important. We need to realize that when we do put our selves on such a pedestal our resulting behavior destroys the very business that we are trying to build.

Yea, this is about customer service. When we fail to see the importance of the customer, we simply forget to put them first. It seems that we forget to care about why they are buying our products or services in the first place, we forget to see the things that we and our business does in their terms, we forget alot of things including how to be kind to our customers. In fact we really forget much more.

So before you think that your so hot remember that without the customer you ain’t got nothin at all. By the way this also includes your employees.

We encourage you to leave your comments and value your thoughts.

The Internal Customer - "Customer Policy Development"

I was reading one of the associate blog sites involved in the development customer service Customer Relations: The New Competitive Edge" written by Meikah, where she brings up an interesting point about customers. The internal customer to be exact.

When push comes to shove the internal customers (employees)usually get the raw end of the deal. Why, because they are seen as an expendable resource, a necessary evil to splitting up the work loads, but not as a quality asset.

In the realms of customer service and customer acquisition, studies have shown that it is the employee, your internal customer that has the greatest effect on the customer buying cycle, repeat customer business, and on going customer relationships. Should I also mention the business culture here as well.

What this means is you better train them not just in their job functions, but a lot more in customer service and relationship management and yes this means the floor clerk, accountant, and warehouse personnel. If you have one employee train them if you have 500 train them and then hold on to them at all cost. Every employee adds value to this customer service and development chain. They maybe the single greatest element to the success of an on going business.

Customer service policies have to cover all aspects of what is a customer; In this case the internal customer or your employees should be the first consideration in their impact on a business, both negative and positive.

Yes training should be a part of the policy mix. It wouldn’t hurt management either.

Please share your comments, they are always welcome.

For more information on Customer Service please visit

Customer Service Policy - Part 3

In the exploration of policy development and the formation of formal policies it is also important to keep in mind the ease in which these policies can be instituted by the manger and the lower staff that comes into direct contact with the customer.

There are many policies instituted by businesses that are virtually rendered useless based on their relevance to the customer and there relevance to how they can be supported or implemented by the staff that has direct responsibility for the customer.

Relevance of the policies that you will use or implement must be considered in all circumstances as these will have a direct effect on customer response to the policies. Such responses can have either a direct positive outcome on resulting customer perceptions of the business and the purchasing of current or future purchases, or they may have a devastating negative effect resulting in dissatisfaction with the company or disengagement with the on going or future buying processes.

Policy choice also has a direct impact on the development of customer relationships and the on going development of long term customer life cycles.

In any case relevancy of any policy and the ease in which it can be implemented must be primary in the policy development and the formation of any policy rgarding customer service.

As always you are invited to leave a comment or to share an idea.

For more information on customer service or the customer experience we recomend that you visit "The Customer Development Center"

Customer Service Policy - Part 2

In addressing the customer service policy it is best to start by making a wish list. No, not what you think you should give to the customer but what you feel the customer wants from you.

Look at it as if you were the customer and then compile a list of what you think you would want, also consider feedback that customers have given you by way of sales people, personal contact and feedback instruments such as surveys.

Cover every aspect of your business such as; sales, store or office atmosphere i.e. displays, flooring, furnishings, decor etc, Accounts (are the billings on time, correct information and totals including credits, How are phones answered, how are receptionist trained to greet customers and handle their issues etc, Warehousing, logistics such as do you ship and deliver on time, the shape of the merchandise when delivered, routing, what shape are the trucks in etc. I think you can get the point from this very abbreviated list. Yes this applies to all businesses including restaurants.

Use large type for each area heading with indented items in your list. Remember customer service if done correctly is the total some experiences of all aspects of a company that a customer associates or comes in contact with. This includes your call center if you use one, in house or outsourced.

Please feel free to leave your comments.

For more information on customer service please visit "The Customer Development Center"

Customer Service the Document - Part 1

Since every business is different it is an erroneous assumption that one must consider Customer Service in a generic perspective. In other words, one size does not fit all. The Customer Service policy statement can be part of a business plan. It is not a mission statement nor is it a action statement. It is a document that spells out exclusively the intent of the company toward its customers, the role of the employees in detail and its policies on how the customer is to be treated.

This isn't by any means exclusive, but a start, a beginning in which a company or small business can begin to form a frame work that enables employees and managers (business owners) to interact, hopeful in a meaningful way, with the customers.

It can contain many things including employee dress codes. Believe it or not this is a big area of complaint from customers although rarely is it openly addressed.

Please feel free to express your opinion.

For more information on customer service please visit "The Customer Development Center
"

What is Customer Service ?

In all the places that I have gone and businesses that I have worked with no one has ever come up with a definition of what customer service is. In fact the notion is quite vague and caries some what of a mystique.

It certainly means different things to different people and when you talk to a consumer the definition to them is certainly polarized opposite of that defined by business owners and managers. Even when talking to business owners and managers the context of what customer service is changes with the person, although they can be grouped according to perspective.

The one lacking ingredient that I constantly come across is the lack of a focus in a business and certainly a lack of any credible policy that could define this question through out a department or company. Do you know what customer service is? May I suggest that you ponder the thought and devise a document that defines “Customer Service” for your business. It doesn't matter whether it is large or small, just get it done. Providing a unified front on any policy strengthens a business. In this case defining what customer service is, will empower both the customer and the employee.

For more information on customer service and customer experience management visit
"The Customer Development Center"

Product or People

What's it all about anyway. I recently meet with a client who just couldn't figure it all out. "What's the big deal about customer service anyway" he said. "Product is what brings in the money. If we sell something we create cash flow right. Just because I have a customer it isn't going to guarantee me anything. Money in hand is what it is all about".

Is he right, is it really focusing on the product and sales that makes it happen or is it really about focusing on the customer? Almost all of the marketing and branding industry supports him. This is especially true of the big firms. Are they right, what are your thoughts on this?

As always we invite your opinions and comments.

For more information on customer service or the "Totall Customer Experience" check out "The Customer Development Center"for current up to date strategies and articles.