Warm, Friendly, and Fast Customer Service Wins You Happy Customers Quicker than Anything

I’m one of those people who prefers not to meddle in Customer Service Affairs. Sometimes it could be pleasant, other times I think people would prefer to get a hickey from Jabba the hut.When I do, it’s because I haven’t gotten whatever that was supposed to be shipped to me. Not seeing my package is akin to losing my luggage at the airport. All that comes to my mind is ” Nooooo!! I’ll never get my ROI (return on investment)” Usually bad customer service comes with the big companies. Their badge of honour. You have some rep at the other end of the phone sounding so depressed your phone decides to hang up on its own.Terrible. They leave you hanging for minutes or the rep is just having a total shitty day they decide to take it out on you. When the good ones come along you notice. Bought a pair of shoes from Antione and Stanley (they have really nice shoes by the way) mailing service screwed up the delivery schedule. I panicked. I tried contacting them all to no avail. I was livid. I wanted their heads. One day, I got to speak to a rep. He took his time to explain why they were unreachable for a while – website was undergoing some kind of  overhaul. He took his time to track my package and tried to calm the critters of worry jumping around in my head. Anytime I contacted them henceforth, he had details regarding my package’s whereabout. He just bought his company a customer by being nice and attentive. I’ll be wearing them as long as they remain in business. The incident that really got me writing this is the one by a company I’ve applied to work for 2 times I think but haven’t gotten the chance to give back instead I try to implement their advice/ experiences in my own startup. Hell being called a “Happiness Hero” makes you feel like you can slay any problem. Buffer. Amazing people . The stories of their customer care are legendary already but this one is all about me. The just launched a feature that enables one to schedule retweets so I took the opportunity to ask about a feature which would be of utmost benefit to me. I asked if they would ever include tagging either via facebook or twitter. Email sent. Ten seconds later, notification pops up. I was taken aback. Hell I thought it would be one of those ” Your message has been queued…” type of email. It wasn’t. Lightning fast response. I was so satisfied with the speed I had to I just had to say “Thank you!!” to Alyssa.

As companies grow big, their customer care becomes sloppy. They outsource. They put the customers in the hands of people who have no first hand experience with the products. Those Service centres focus on the volume of calls that come in but not the happiness of customers. You cannot blame Suthir all the way in bangalore when he’s unable to help you. He’ll get queried if he spends more than four minutes with you. The company begins to bleed customers. Do they solve their customer service problems? No, they spend more on marketing. They forget ads are just words and customer service is action. The face of the company. The CEO is just a big banner ad. Remember when Steve Jobs was being particularly rude to people but people overlooked it because the service from the Apple store was great? Word of mouth at work. Great customer service will always drown out bad press as I’ve come to observe. People love being taken care of and hey Buffer can have my dollar as soon as Treejump goes into the black cause I know I’ll be taken care of.

The Gideon Principle: Finding Your “A Players”

   The world of business is teeming with articles, podcast, tweets, videos, etc. on hiring “A players”. How does this help the new entrepreneur? It doesn’t. For a fact it makes life harder for beginner and intermediate level entrepreneurs trying not to make mistakes that could tank the business. Enter the “A player”. The “A player” has been billed as someone fantastic at their job. That’s all I’ve got! There seems to be an inordinate focus on recruiting from the outside. I think that’s a death knell. Recruit those whom you’ve already hired. I came across this short story while doing some research to string together methods for hiring used biblically. Let’s face it the bible has more stories about recruitment than any other book. Here’s Gideon’s recruitment story. To give a little bit of context, Gideon had thirty-two thousand men.

 “Send home any of your men who are timid and afraid”

     It does you as a business owner a lot better to list out your company’s goal and vision to the smallest detail in a comprehensive language. You can’t have the leisure of being vague. Constantly hammering it into the ear drums of your team will help them make the decision to stay or leave. It will also help them visualize better the herculean tasks ahead.

“Divide them into two groups decided by the way they drink. Everyone who laps from the water with his tongue, as a dog laps, you shall set apart by himself; likewise everyone who gets down on his knees to drink.”

    After the first test, twenty-two thousand men were sent home and the number still had to be reduced. We have those who will work long hours but are not passionate about your company’s goals and ambitions. Working for you is just a means of survival. There’s no personal stake in it. These two groups become apparent as the journey progresses. There are those who are company centred and there are those who are self-centred. You want the company centred people. Great work ethic coupled with a bad attitude is a big NO.

 

“I’ll conquer the Midianites with these three hundred”

   The soldiers got whittled from ten thousand to just three hundred. This proves that the best work is done with small teams; that’s why big corporations are constantly scared of kids from the garage. Second, congratulations if anyone has survived the axe this far. You have found those as passionate about the mission as yourself. Constantly being on the lookout in your company to retain the most passionate brings other passionate people to your business after all like attracts like. You’ll feel the energy in the office yourself and your customers will notice.

Real Problems: If Entrepreneurs Ain’t Doing It, VCs It’s Your Fault.

Everyone has them. VCs want you to solve them. But just what are real problems? World hunger? Meteor showers? World peace? The Harlem Shake(youtube trend)? Real problems are the things you deem them to be. I understand why a lot of VCs are beginning to make this proclamation but they must also remember that this trend of unreal problem solving is part of the pie they have brought to the table. Take for instance a service released becomes so successful beyond measure it begins a trend. Everybody wants to become the “next …” and VCs too only want to fund the “next …”. When these investments fail, they begin to call on entrepreneurs to solve real problems and the cycle continues.

Real problems are what you’d like them to be. If my cereal can’t stay crunchy for longer than a minute and gets all soggy, that’s a real problem for me.I’ll be glad if someone invented cereal that would stay crunch for hours. Problems might be real to some and those problems nonexistent to another.Take my cereal problem for example. The inventions that we use to this present day were problems the inventors knew they had and they knew no one would probably be as passionate about solving it. It’s pretty easy to look at a person’s idea, throw your hands in the air, say it’s not a real problem, and dismiss it. If everyone did that, we would still be using carriages, candles, there would be no electronic devices, people would still be hired to paddle ships, and slavery will be rampant. So how will investors help real problems get solved? Here’s what I propose.

Don’t have a predefined scope of what real problems are: Investors seem to have gridlocked their minds on what real problems are so much as when real investment opportunities come, they pass them up. Bad bad for business. This way, more entrpreneurs will settle for “me too” products. You’re out fishing for trouts and refuse to accept the sardines that come your way(I’m getting awesome at fish analogy 🙂 ).

Look past the trends: get off the next carbon copy bandwagon and keep your ears to the ground. Many people are solving loads of problems they have and are not on the radar but are enjoying the fruits of invention. Seek them out. Crowd funding is your smoke signal.

Demand entrepreneurs solve the problem 50% better than what’s on the market: Hell if you don’t want to get off the “next…” bandwagon, demand the people you’re funding do the job 50 percent better than their competitors. When you have just another copycat product company in your portfolio, you get a bunch of stressed out employees who are constantly made to copy. We all know how grumpy employees are bad for business.

Make sure these problems make the entrepreneurs want to take over the galaxy just to solve it:  If it’s not personal then you’re going to get something half arsed. Yeah the entrepreneur can be hardworking but if it’s not personal affair, innovation will not come. If he/ she wants a computer on every desk, better make sure it’s because he/she is disgusted with the amount of work involved with paper so much that when he speaks about it Darth Vader gets cold feet. It just has to be personal.

Easy on the greed: We’re past the Gordon Gekko era. Many entrepreneurs want to have you on board but that Eau de Greed scent is really off putting. The problems you fund require time. That luxury car you’re driving didn’t come in 2 years. It took years of fine tuning. Don’t haggle people into going public or a sale when they’re not ready cause you want to pad your net worth. You were brought on board to help. Bloody help or leave. Whoever comes up with a system to curate the venture capitalist greed would have solved a problem many entrepreneurs face.

The Barnum Method: Pull Your Customers

      What is your magic sauce? What is that “thing” that will make your customers curious about you? What keeps people intrigued about your company? These are amongst the many questions people ask themselves but never quite possibly come up with an answer. There’s this saying in Silicon Valley “build it and they will come.” but what will bring them to it? P. T Barnum, the most prominent showman ever in America’s history came up with an intriguing solution to get people to his museum.  While his museum was visited at the capacity he wished, he met a homeless man dressed him up, gave him 3 bricks and asked him to lay those bricks on the road changing their position as he moved along. This man had to have the sincerest look of focus on his face. He had to be lost in concentration. He was to lay these bricks from a certain point on the road and into the museum and starting over. People noticed this strange man on the street and word about him spread. Soon a crowd big enough to obstruct traffic was soon following this man curious about whatever hypothesis he was trying to refute or prove. This man led the crowd with only three bricks into the museum and out but something magical happened once they were in the museum, they didn’t care much for the man anymore but decided to explore the treasures of the museum. Barnum had figured out his pull. Barnum had figured a way to use word of mouth to his advantage all the while making his original goal of bringing people into the museum invisible.

    What is your pull? We take Apple and Google for example. Apple’s pull are design and ease of use. They craft their devices in ways you can’t imagine possible before them and lure you into their ecosystem where you discover their products are easier to use than the competition. This makes you want to see more of what Apple has to offer. In Google’s case, they give you speed and a clean interface. We dumped Yahoo and other search engines because of the speed. You got a Gmail account because it was faster than the competition, then you used Google Docs, and transitioned to the Android OS. Coca Cola’s pull is universal availability. Where ever you are, you are sure to find a bottle or can of Coke. Another offering from Coca Cola sounds like a good idea when you know you can find it anywhere. Your pull doesn’t even have to be a product alone. People appreciate fantastic customer service. That alone can make people establish trust with your brand knowing they’ll always be taken care of. It is amazing when you figure out your “pull” and capitalize on it. Your customers will be willing to stand by you even in tough times or ride higher with you with their wallets. Your “pull” is your word of mouth generator. Figure it out, and watch your company smile in the hearts of your customers. Barnum got his customers with three bricks, I think you can do a lot more.