What is Great Customer Service?:  A SparkCX point of view (POV)

When we set out to revolutionize customer experiences across all industries, we thought it was important to start by answering a simple, but fundamental question:

What does great customer service look like?

If you’ve been in this world a few decades, you’ve experienced great customer service and poor customer service, and everything in between. However, if you want to create great customer service consistently, then you must define it, break it down into its core components and then empower every employee in your organization to live it every moment of every day.

When you think of great customer service, what brands come to mind? Most people will cite the Four Seasons, Costco, Amazon, Chic-Fil-A, Zappos, Netflix, Nordstrom and Disney. Wait? So we can find exceptional customer service in hospitality, entertainment, fast food, and retail? That means there must be some patterns that work across industries and channels.

I love the customer service at Amazon and Netflix, and I’ve never spoken to someone who works there. I only shop at Nordstrom because their humans are great, but I rarely will shop their digital store.

That brings us to two important questions. First – does great customer service matter in life? If the answer to the first question is yes, then what do these customer experiences have in common that makes them great in-person and online?

The answer to the first question is a resounding HELL YES! Not only does great customer service position these brands as best in their category, but they are also more profitable, have higher employee retention, and possess a strategic advantage that has lasted decades. There is no question that great customer service is a competitive advantage.

What does great customer service look like? We’ve broken it down into three core components: You know me; You take care of me; You exceed my expectations. That’s it. It’s that simple, but it’s incredibly hard for large organizations to pull off across millions of interactions over long periods of time.

You know me.

How can a company know me? What if it’s the first time I’ve ever interacted with this organization? There are some simple techniques that all great customer experience brands use to make us feel known and welcome.

1. The Greeting – When you answer the phone or I walk into your workplace, are you making me feel like I’m the most important focus for you at that moment. Smiles can be seen AND heard. Are you smiling when you greet me, are you giving me your full attention, or are you multi-tasking or distracted by something else.
2. My Name – Do you take the time to learn my name? Do you use it in our conversation?   The sweetest sound we all hear is the sound of our name. Have you taken the time to learn how to pronounce it right? My younger brother’s name is Kenrik, and when we were growing up he would introduce himself and 90% of the time, the person would repeat back his name and add a D into his name. For anyone named Kendrick in this world, this is not about you. This happened so much that eventually my brother wouldn’t correct the person. As the protective older brother, I wasn’t settling for that. I’ve been sternly correcting people to pronounce my brother’s name correctly for the better part of 40 years. It’s not hard. Learn how to pronounce the name of the person with whom you are speaking.
3. Personalization – Are you learning something unique about me and leveraging it in our relationship? This is where technology has really changed the game giving brands such as Amazon and Netflix to do personalization at scale…with hundreds of millions of people every day. Do you have to reach that scale? No. But if you are not leveraging technology to move towards better personalization, then what are you doing?

You take care of me.

If I walk into your store or pick up the phone and take time out of my busy day to speak with you, then what I’m really doing is asking for your help. Asking for help is the most human and vulnerable thing we can do. Here are some of the worst things you can do to another human when they ask you for help.

Ignore me. Frustrate me. Tell me it’s not your job to help me. Tell me it’s my fault for needing help right now.

If you saw one of your friends behave this way to another friend when responding to a plea for help, you would tell that friend not to be mean. And yet, this is happening across most organizations and their contact centers every single day.

We think there is a better path forward. By analyzing your calls daily, you can empower your agents to solve customer problems faster, solve customer problems before they need to talk to an agent, and provide a better quality of life for your agents.

There has been a debate in the industry about Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) vs. Customer Effort Score (CES). CSAT scores are starting to lose efficacy in the industry. Turns out only your happy customers will take the time to fill out a follow up survey, while the customers that don’t like you just quietly leave you. While the concept behind CES seems right, there aren’t any scientifically proven ways to measure that. More on that in a future blog.

That said, empowering your agents to reduce the amount of effort on your customer to get their problem taken care of…That’s it. When I call asking for help, please make sure your agents are empowered with the systems, tools and processes to solve my problem quickly, efficiently and nicely.

You exceed my expectations.

This one should be easy to accomplish, given the state of the customer service industry today. Unfortunately, its rarely done. However, if you can exceed my expectations, then you can earn a repeat customer for life!

If you’ve made me feel welcome, and solved my problem, then my customer sentiment is at a high, which is when you want to exceed my expectations and connect me to your brand for life. Offer me something of value in that moment. It can be as simple as a $10 off digital coupon if I shop with you in the next thirty days. It could be 10% off my next bill as a thank you for being a loyal customer. It’s not the size of the gesture that matters, it’s the gesture itself that exceeds expectations.

Here's an unexpected benefit you may not be thinking about. You didn’t just earn a repeat customer, you reduced agent turnover. One of the most joyous things we can do as humans is to give without any expectation of receiving. If your agents are truly empowered to delight their customers, their happiness goes up, which results in lower turnover, absenteeism, etc.

You now have the ingredients for great customer service! Just like cooking a beautiful meal, the ingredients by themselves are not enough, it’s just the start of the process. Now, you need to take these ingredients and combine them into all aspects of your contact center. You must integrate this into your training curriculum, scripts, knowledge base, IVR, chat bots, QA process, agent scoring, coaching, etc. As you seek to integrate, you must identify and remove all business process and systems issues that could be a blocker to unleashing great customer service.

Lastly, you must commit to a culture of continuous improvement. Why? Because your customers will always be delightfully unsatisfied. As soon as you improve their experience, you have reset their expectations. Think about the brands above. Amazon can’t imagine a world where their customers love their prices and selection, but want to receive packages slower, so they invest in getting to same day delivery. Netflix can’t imagine a world where their customers won’t want new, unique content, so they invest billions in their content library.

Chewy scores the highest NPS scores in any industry. Their CEO has been quoted that “We are the only company in the world that has live, human 24x7 customer service.   Customer service can be a moat that builds loyalty that enables you to compete against the toughest competition in the world.” With this approach, they’ve grown from $1B to $12B capturing over 25% of pet households in the U.S. Consider a real testimony from one of their customers:

“Chewy seriously has some of the best customer service around. When my family dog passed says they sent a card and flowers the next day after I had cancelled his prescription AND the woman I spoke with on the phone asked me about my dog and stayed on with me while I cried and was upset. She even said I can call back anytime I just wanted to talk. Talk about customer service and building loyalty, such a MASSIVE differentiator! Doing it their own way!!”

If you’re a CX leader reading this, you might think “I can’t change this all on my own, I need all these other leaders in my organization too.” To that I say yes, but never underestimate the impact one person can have on an organization. If you commit to this journey, to building a culture of great customer experience and continuous improvement, you’ll be surprised at how many people across your organization will jump in to join you.

The time for thinking is over. You now have the ingredients. There is no turning back. It’s time to act. We’d love to help.