Exceptional Customer Service

The last person you spoke to is the most likely to buy from you again. Exceptional customer service is how you make sure they do. It isn’t a hard rule, but word of mouth works that way in every business I have run support for.

A repeat customer doesn’t happen by accident. It takes hard graft and constant work, and it starts with building a relationship.

Why does exceptional customer service start with a thank you?

When a customer first signs up, thank them. They didn’t have to bring their business to you. Whatever your industry, you have competitors. A simple thank-you email will usually do. When the contract is big enough, ramp it up to a personal letter, or a bottle of wine at Christmas.

Talking to them at signup is the easy part. The harder question is what you say when they’re having a problem.

What do you say to a customer who has an open issue?

Speak even more.

The customer’s only line into the status of their issue is you. I have “saved” customers many times just by giving them updates. I hadn’t solved the problem. It still existed. All I did was tell them what we were doing about it, give them a timeframe for when I expected (hoped and prayed, in some cases) it to be fixed, and tell them when I would next be in touch.

If you give a customer a commitment, keep it. Think about it from their side. If you were the one with the broken service, wouldn’t you want to know what was going on? You have customers of your own who are asking you the same thing.

Speaking more also means speaking first. A customer who hears from you before they have to chase you is a customer who still trusts you. One who has to chase you has already started shopping around in their head.

This is usually missing at the lower levels of a support team, and it’s the part you should enforce and drive down from the top. Your staff don’t need to hand out sensitive information to keep a customer happy. Most customers know the person on the phone isn’t the one who caused the problem. They’re the one trying to solve it. (For the ones who don’t, I’ll cover handling irate customers in depth in a later post.)

How many ways should customers be able to reach you?

As many as you can afford. Resources matter here. You don’t want to promise 24/7 phone support with a staff of one. But in addition to email, offer chat. When you grow to the point where you can offer telephone support, do it, even if it’s only outbound at first.

Why does a failed service cost you more than one customer?

Whenever you deal with a customer, keep one thing uppermost in your mind: the issue that made them contact you is hitting their business. The only reason they’re paying you is so you can provide a specific service. Once you fail at that, you haven’t kept your side of the bargain.

Many surveys point to the same figure: a customer with a bad service experience tells at least 10 other people. So you haven’t just put one customer’s revenue at risk. You may have lost 10 more. Bad news travels faster than good service ever does.

What should you do after you have restored the service?

I’m assuming you kept the customer informed all the way through, so they aren’t too annoyed with you. The first time it happens, a brief apology is usually enough. Hopefully you have an SLA in place, and you haven’t breached its terms.

That conversation is uncomfortable. It’s less uncomfortable than the one where the customer has already moved to a competitor. And if the issue has been fixed by the time you speak, don’t let the call end at the apology. Tell them what failed, what you changed, and what you’ll do if it happens again.

If it keeps happening, consider upgrading the customer to a better package, even for a limited time. You’d be surprised how often that works. It isn’t free, but compare it to the cost of finding a replacement customer.

Why is keeping a customer easier than finding a new one?

Exceptional customer service matters because retaining customers is significantly easier than winning new ones. Harvard Business Review’s piece on the value of keeping the right customers puts numbers on it: a 5% improvement in retention can lift profits by anywhere from 25% to 95%.

Churn and retention are terms you’ll hear a lot, and in some industries, telecoms for example, entire departments exist to address just that. Their only goal is to stop existing customers leaving for a competitor.

Here’s a simple example. You’re the industry leader with 1 million customers. Your nearest competitor has half a million, so you think you’re doing great. But you’re only growing 10% a year because of the negative press, and you’re churning 25% a year to that competitor, who is growing 50% in the same period. How long do you think you stay on top?

It’s a lot shorter than you think. Run the arithmetic. At 50% growth the competitor goes from 500,000 customers to 750,000 in one year, and to roughly 1.1 million in two. Even if you stood perfectly still, you’d be second. And you aren’t standing still. At 25% churn you’re losing 250,000 customers a year, so you have to win that many new ones just to stay level.

What does your team need to believe?

You want your customers to experience exceptional customer service, so that the growth the competitor is getting flows toward your company instead. This has to be believed, understood and lived by your customer service representatives and support teams. They need to know the reason they get a paycheque is that customers are paying for it.

It’s trite, a little tired and a little old, but one phrase still holds:

The customer is always right.

Love it, believe it and spread it.

Hutch Morzaria

Hutch Morzaria is a CX and Support Leadership professional with 19 years of experience building and leading support organizations across SaaS, Fintech, and enterprise technology. He has held Director-level roles at Q4 Inc, AudienceView, Johnson Controls, and others, and holds ITIL Expert certification across V3 and V4.