The importance of cultivating personal relationships with customers cannot be over-stated: we more readily buy from a friend than a stranger. However, our position within a social group is also a powerful and private motivator. Those experiences that elevate our status are often the most highly valued. This chapter will show you how to engage your customers on a social level.
Trade is a social act. J.S. MILL
Every now and then I am reminded just how basic the mechanics of business really are. It’s easy to get sucked into the sham complexity of it all: the Gantt charts, gearing ratios, strategy decks, SWOTS, PESTS and the meaningless jargon. They’re an easy way to blur the boundaries between activity and progress, or lend gravitas to the banal, but in doing so we also forget just how simple things can and should be.
As a case in point, my friend Ben called me a couple of years ago. He said he’d just got off the phone with a lovely woman who’d been really helpful sorting out his car insurance. He said I should give her a call; she might be able to sort me out too. I instantly forgot. A week later, he called me again to say he’d spoken to her again; she had a name now – Sarah Jayne – and again he said I should call her. He’d clearly made a new friend.
A week or so later, I did call her. It was immediately after yet another infuriating encounter with my then insurance provider. I’d spent for ever being passed around various departments, waiting on hold and talking to mandroids who could only tell me what their computers told them. True to Ben’s word, she really was lovely: friendly, warm, polite and interested. For a moment I thought I’d entered a strange parallel universe: here I was, applying for insurance over the phone, not wanting to kill myself. I was actually enjoying it.
Let’s fast forward to today: Ben has his car and household contents insured with her. I have both cars and my house contents insured with her. I have told everyone in the known universe (known to me that is) about how good she is to deal with. Last week I received a newsletter from her company telling me they are moving: they’ve grown to the extent that they need larger premises. Consider the context. In an industry dominated by huge players and price comparison sites, set against the backdrop of economic turmoil, a small town brokerage is doing a roaring trade, outgrowing its offices.
Here’s another couple of names: Andrew Hill and Eilidh Ferguson. I met them through being a customer of theirs when they worked at a local café but now we’re friends. Andy is a great chef, and Eilidh, who works front-of-house, is one of the most welcoming, accommodating hosts I’ve had the pleasure of being served by. They recently opened their own pub, an act of madness the media would assure you: pubs are closing at a rate of 50 a week!1 Well, they’ve only been open for a month or two, and getting a table for dinner already involves booking days in advance. They can’t cope with the demand.
I could go on: Paul Lee owns a picture framing business in Oxford’s Covered Market. He’s a lovely guy, great at what he does, and has a genuine passion for his business that you can sense from the moment he opens his mouth. I’ve not bought a picture frame elsewhere for nine years, even though I have to wait a few weeks: he’s always busy you see.
Is it mere coincidence that I know these people by name, that they are a genuine pleasure to be around, and that their businesses are a great success? I think not. If anything it’s the reason for their success. Human beings are social creatures. It’s in our DNA. There’s a reason why solitary confinement is almost unbearable: we need social interaction to be healthy and happy. When it comes to a customer experience then, those that make doing business a social pleasure stand head and shoulders above the competition.
Make it personal
A warm welcome by attentive, charismatic staff stands out like a beautiful, handwritten letter in a sea of junk mail, and one moment of outstanding personal service can leave an indelible impression on a customer. I’ve collected great examples from friends over the years, probably my favourite is a friend’s mother who is still raving about a bank clerk who paid a home visit when she was taken ill over 50 years ago.
Vitsoe Shelving – personal service
Date: Tue, 27 October 2009 at 7:25 PM
Hi Matt
It’s been a little while but I wanted to send a note to ask how your installation had gone of your bay of shelves. I hope that they have been useful and that everything went well in putting them up. I remember you were installing it in your barn and it would be great to see a photo of your space if possible.
Get in touch if there is anything else I can help with.
Best wishes
Nick
There is much to be gained by adding a personal touch to the customer experience. Whether it’s just remembering a customer’s name, building a genuine friendship, or catering for an unusual request. In a world where we are often treated like digits and feel dwarfed by the size of the enterprise, to be treated as an individual is truly refreshing. This is easier than ever with social media services like Facebook and Twitter. Just today I booked my car in for a service simply by sending a Facebook message to the director of the garage I use. Ask yourself ‘How can we add a personal touch to the experience?’
Japan Airlines – thank you notes
First class travellers on Japan Airlines often receive a handwritten thank you note from their cabin crew when disembarking. Some passengers have been known to collect them. Customers don’t have to pay a huge premium to be treated like individuals, though. Opportunities are everywhere. Why not think about how you can offer a personal thank you to your customers. It’s nice to feel appreciated.
A fantastic piece in the New York Herald Tribune quoted a Mr G.L. Clements of Jewel Stores Chicago, who has some thoughts on what makes a good customer experience:
The supermarket that ‘offers the shopper the subtle, psychological values’ will have a better chance to build a profitable customer following than one which depends solely on low price and good quality merchandise …
In determining how to provide ‘psychological values’ attractive to the customer, Mr Clements said he thought a business should seek to develop ‘the same traits that we like in our friends’. He outlined these traits as being cleanliness, up-to-date appearance, generosity, courtesy, honesty, patience, sincerity, sympathy and good-naturedness. Each store operator, he said, should ask himself whether the store has these traits …2
That was on 10 May 1949 – over 60 years ago. If only his advice had been heeded. Nowadays if we even get to speak to someone there is a strong chance they will exhibit none of those qualities, often through no fault of their own. It is more than likely that their performance is assessed by the number of calls they are able to handle in a day. They will also be unable to express any sincerity or good-naturedness, since they will have an approved script to read from. By the time they get to you it’s probably the hundredth time they’ve said the same thing that day. Unfortunately, there is a strong tendency for employees to treat the customer the way they are treated themselves by the organisation, and they aren’t always treated well. Employees, especially those on the front line, are a hugely undervalued resource in every business I’ve worked with.
Clearly a waiter’s job is so much more than carrying the food from the kitchen to the table. Likewise a call centre worker does much more than simply handling queries. The same goes for the guy stacking shelves in the supermarket. These people are the personification of the business: they are its human face. We don’t often deal with the chef, the boss or the manager. With this in mind, in addition to their daily duties it’s worth considering the vital roles that they can and should be playing.
Your employees are your USP
If you own a traditional bricks and mortar shop, what is stopping your customers from buying your product or service online, for a lower price at greater convenience? If the answer is ‘nothing’, you are probably already in trouble. Last year it was announced that the high street bookseller Waterstones would be closing 11 branches, US retailer Borders is also in dire-straits; and yet according to The Guardian, ‘after years of falling sales and closures, many independents are now flourishing, marking themselves out from the high-discount competition by offering character, wide-ranging live events and personal service’. The new managing director at Waterstones is now doing his best to ‘return to the chain’s traditional values of individuality and highly knowledgeable service’.3
If I just wanted to buy a book I could simply go online and do it. But I also like to browse, and discover something new. I like it when people recommend something to me. Knowledgeable, passionate staff can add a personal touch to the customer experience that a website simply can’t match. Ask yourself ‘What do our staff bring to the experience that cannot be easily imitated by competitors? How can their knowledge, passion and skill make for a unique experience?’
Trailfinders – knowledgeable, friendly staff
At the time of writing, travel agents are closing down left, right and centre. Household name Thomas Cook reported a £398 million loss in 2011 and is now closing 200 branches in a bid to turn things around.4 The cause of their demise is not just the economic downturn, it’s the rise of online booking and price comparison sites like travelsupermarket.com, lastminute.com or kayak.co.uk.
How then is Trailfinders flourishing? The answer: expert staff and great personal service. Online reviews praise their staff, who seem to have spent their lives travelling, and so can piece together an ideal itinerary for almost any trip. As a nice touch, when you log in to see your itinerary online there is a photo in the top-right corner of the person who took your booking, along with their contact details, which does a lot to humanise the business.
The results speak for themselves: in 2012 Trailfinders topped the Which? Consumer Travel Survey, scoring 97 per cent customer satisfaction. They also won the Which? Best Travel Company award in 2011 among other plaudits from the Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and The Sunday Times.5 How did I hear about them? A friend referred me of course.
Everyone works in marketing
Not so long ago I was returning home from London on the train and ended up chatting with the man sitting opposite me. Conversation turned to our professional lives, and he explained that he worked in waste management. I said I’d always wondered what happened after the recycling had been collected, and to my surprise we spent the next half-hour engrossed in conversation about it. He explained to me how advanced their facilities were, that they were able to sort through the rubbish automatically using lasers that could tell different materials apart. To my surprise I found our conversation quite fascinating. He spoke with genuine passion for his work, not something you’d expect when talking about rubbish. Mike (I remember his name) did a better job of promoting the company he worked for than any advert could.
Every employee works in marketing: they could be telling friends and family what a great business they work for, about the cool products and services they offer. Better yet, they could actually be showing people. They are in a uniquely trusted position to share their opinion with credibility and confidence. Ask yourself ‘What message are our staff communicating about our business? How can we make them our most trusted advocates?’
Your people are your loyalty scheme
It is far easier to be loyal to a person than to a brand: we place more trust in those we have a personal relationship with, and more readily buy from a friend than a stranger. Would you rather get your morning coffee from the shop where they greet you as a friend and know your order before you ask, or the one where they don’t even say hello? It is unlikely that my friend Ben and I will buy insurance from anyone but SJ even if it’s cheaper. Likewise with my business bank. I know the manager and have done for years. When I need something I can just call, text or e-mail them and it’s taken care of.
Your front-line staff are your research team
On most of the projects I work on there is a requirement for research. We need to get a feel for the territory and get to know as much as possible about customers and the movements of the market. The usual approach is to hire a research consultancy to come in, take a brief, then disappear to report back in a month or two. Most clients also conduct workshops where customers come into the office and voice their opinions.
This has always struck me as a bit odd. Surely we have people who are dealing with customers every day in shops, call centres, or out on the road? Better still, why aren’t management spending time on the shopfloor themselves to develop a rich feel for what’s really going on? Why aren’t software developers working an hour or two a week on the helpdesk so that they understand their customers’ frustrations?
In the last seven years I have seen a senior manager perform a customer-facing role zero times. Before paying for research why not make the most of what you’ve got? Get down on the shopfloor and ask your staff: they’ll appreciate feeling involved in making improvements. Better still, walk a mile in their shoes and see for yourself. Ask yourself ‘Are the front-line staff contributing meaningfully to improving our customer experience?’
Your people are your contingency plan
You can tell a lot about a business by how things are handled when they go wrong. In fact, we often rate a customer experience more highly if we experience a problem that is well resolved than if we never experienced one at all. All too often when something goes awry, the emphasis is solely on getting us back to the position we’d be in if we’d never had the problem in the first place. This approach ignores the costs associated with the problem: the wasted time, effort, and loss of enjoyment.
Ritz-Carlton – $2000 per guest
Every staff member of the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain is authorised to spend up to $2000 on a guest, per incident(!), to create a wonderful experience for the customer. Critically this is not just in the case of a problem, it’s if an opportunity presents itself to do something outstanding. One example includes building a wooden walk-way down to the beach with a tent set up for a man and his wife (who was in a wheelchair) to have dinner,6 not as a customer request, but off their own backs. This attitude is clearly ingrained in the Ritz-Carlton culture, and training is a major factor in turning this into a reality. But any business could give its front-line staff a set of customer experience guidelines to follow as part of their training. This would not only make their jobs more rewarding by giving them a little more autonomy, but would also tune them into noticing opportunities and issues. Everybody wins.
You can reap enormous benefits by treating problems as opportunities to show flair, commitment and caring, rather than waiting to be bullied into compensation by your customer, or doing the bare minimum to get them back on the rails where they came off. Ask yourself ‘How can we turn a negative into a positive? When mistakes happen how can we show that we really care?’
When disputes arise, it’s all too easy to focus on who’s right or wrong: if the customer is at fault, why should you do anything? Put your sword down for a second, and ask yourself ‘What’s more important, being right or being liked? What’s really in your interests: feeling smug or building a long-term relationship? There is also one more crucial thing to bear in mind: the word ‘customer’ means a lot more than just who pays the bill. When we become a customer, we automatically become endowed with a privileged status. In our minds, to be a customer is to be important. From this point on the business is there to serve us, and to serve is to be a servant. This is worth reflecting on for a minute.
Status update
Think about a bad customer experience that you’ve had. Maybe a waiter was rude to you, or someone didn’t return your call. Perhaps you called up to ask for assistance and they refused to help you. Maybe you went into a shop, and rather than offer to help, the staff just stood around chatting among themselves. All of these experiences are unpleasant to us because they diminish our status: it is a failure to recognise our importance, to honour and respect our higher standing that is the root of the problem.
This privileged status is universal: it is a fundamental part of being a customer. It applies whether we are buying a doughnut or a Bentley. When a business acts like they don’t care about us, it’s a status issue. In a customer’s head, other customers do not exist, or if they do, they aren’t as important as we are. One of the worst possible things you can say to a customer is, ‘I’ve got a hundred other customers I need to deal with today. You are taking up too much time.’ It makes us feel insignificant.
The subject of status often goes unconsidered because it is an intensely personal and private issue. To mention it is almost taboo, or at least considered ill-mannered, but just because it goes unsaid does not make it unimportant. As Alain De Botton’s book Status Anxiety explains, ‘… high status is thought by many (but freely admitted by few) to be one of the finest of earthly goods… We all suffer – to a greater or lesser degree, usually privately and with embarrassment – from status anxiety.’7 We care, even if we don’t share.
Bloomberg Software – an unusual status symbol
The pleasure derived from status can account for all manner of bizarre behaviours. I came across a fascinating example of this recently, when reading an article about Bloomberg’s financial markets software. The design of the user interface is generally accepted as hideous, complex and difficult to use, yet resistance to a re-design from the users is strong. Why? Its mastery is seen as a status symbol.
As Dominique Leca writes in UX Magazine, ‘The pain inflicted by blatant UI (user interface) flaws is strangely transformed into the rewarding experience of looking like a hard-core professional. The Bloomberg Terminal interface looks terrible, but it allows traders to pretend that you need to be experienced and knowledgeable to use it. Users favour complexity and clutter over efficiency and clarity to sustain a fictive status symbol.’8
Status is not just about conspicuous displays of wealth, or trying to impress our neighbours, it’s much broader than that. Nobody enters the Olympics with their heart set on coming in seventh: they want to be number one, gold. You might dream of being the boss one day; you probably don’t dream of being someone’s minion. Status is fundamentally important to all of us. We crave it, not least of all because it’s good for us. In The Pursuit of Pleasure, Lionel Tiger explains how experiments show that elevated status actually changes our brain and body chemistry, increasing levels of a secretion called serotonin, which has been shown to play a variety of roles in our health and well-being.
Tiger concludes, ‘The central fact is that a substance that the body generates is stimulated by an individual’s social position. When the substance reaches a certain level, the individual exhibits characteristics of comfort and good health … He or she enjoys better physical, and presumably, mental health than individuals lower in the hierarchical system … Status differences translate into physiological ones. Both lower status and uncertainty about status are physiologically disturbing. They are also likely to be psychologically disquieting.’9 In other words high status is not only pleasurable, it’s good for our health.
Bugaboo Donkey – the £1200 pushchair
It seems there is no object that cannot be used to confer status on its owner. Witness the Bugaboo Donkey – the first baby stroller to break the thousand-pound barrier. Who would pay that amount for something the baby will literally grow out of in a relatively short time? Actually, a lot of people. When the Donkey was released in 2011 eager parents had to be placed on a waiting list. A spokesman from high street retailer John Lewis said, ‘It’s been massive. We’ve been selling the equivalent of one an hour over the last week which is very impressive given that it’s such an expensive product.’10
The implications for customer experiences are clear: the experiences that we enjoy the most are those that elevate our status and make us feel important. For each stage of the customer journey ask yourself the simple question ‘What are we doing to make the customer feel important?’
Summary
- Human beings are social creatures. Those that make doing business a social pleasure stand head and shoulders above the competition.
- One moment of outstanding personal service can leave an indelible impression on a customer.
- Where possible add a personal touch to the customer experience.
- Front-line staff are the human embodiment of the business: they are a precious asset.
- Your employees are potentially a powerful source of differentiation – put their knowledge and personalities to good use.
- Remember that every employee works in marketing. What are they saying about your business?
- It is far easier to be loyal to a person than to a brand. Building personal relationships with customers will keep them coming back.
- Your front-line staff know more about your customers than anyone else. Put their expertise to use to improve your customer experience. You are already paying for them, and they’ll feel more valued too – everybody wins.
- Treat problems as opportunities to show flair, commitment and caring. Don’t just do the bare minimum.
- When we become a customer, we automatically become endowed with a privileged status. Above all else, make every customer feel important.