Do you really know how your customers experience your company’s sales and customer service systems?
By Phil Krone, President
Whenever I have difficulty buying a product or service or receive poor customer service I always wonder if the company’s owners and management have any idea how difficult it is for their prospects and customers to buy from them.
After years of sharing books with my wife on Kindle, I was no longer able to do so. No warning, no explanation and not even a suggested solution. What had changed? My phone—I had a new one. Looking for help online I discovered that many others had faced the same problem. Several offered clues on how to fix it.
Even so, we ended up talking to four different Amazon customer service people and wasting a good six hours before solving the problem. More than once, we thought about just buying a second copy of the book but then realized if we didn’t fix it now we might always be buying second copies.
Here’s another example. My expensive pair of New Balance shoes developed a hole over the toe area. A retail salesperson told me it was a common problem for people whose toes rise up when they walk. Why hadn’t New Balance incorporated thicker, stronger material on the top? I thought I would do the company a favor by writing to them online. But their customer service form was all dropdowns without any way to write in a design suggestion.
Similar frustration can come when you experience a technical difficulty and report it to customer service. The rep is helpful and polite. A follow-up survey asks you to rate the rep but not the technology problem that led to making a call in the first place. Why not?
Last example: Recently, I saw an ad in a popular magazine that I knew cost the advertiser a lot of money. (We place similar ads in the same magazine for one of our law firm clients.) Curious about the offering in the ad, I wrote the person whose name, email, and phone number were listed. After not receiving a response, I called, and no one picked up so I left a message. A week later another email from me resulted in another non-response. In fact, it took three phone calls before someone called back. Did the people who spent thousands of dollars on that ad know how much effort one of their prospective customers went through just to get a return call?
As you might imagine, the way to learn firsthand what your customers experience is simple: call customer service yourself. Or place an order with your sales department. Not only will you learn how your people answer the phone, but you’ll also learn how efficient ordering and delivery are.
Years ago, a banker asked me to pretend to be a prospect looking for a condo in a new building on the North Side of Chicago. (This was before requirements were in place to pre-sell units before construction could even begin.) Despite being in a highly popular neighborhood, the building was vacant, and the banker wanted to know why. My sales experience was so terrible that I suggested the bank fire their marketing firm and hire people who knew how to sell. The problem? The sales agent was pretending that almost all of the units were sold, a terrible sales tactic that uses false urgency to make a sale. Clearly, most of the condo-seekers didn’t buy it—or a condo.
As regular readers know, we usually cover business-to-business topics in this column, but I believe the lessons here are relevant for both consumer and business sales.