Today we’re doing experiment. I’m going to present three scenarios and I want you to think if they have ever happened to you.
Three scenarios where companies let you down
Scenario 1:
You buy a new product— let’s say it’s a router for your home network. You follow the directions, get it all hooked up… and it doesn’t work. Frustrating, but you’re not really mad about it. This kind of thing rarely goes right on the first shot. So you find the company’s support number and call it.
Ninety minutes later you’ve navigated through seven different “Push X For…” menus, spent half an hour on hold, and talked to three people who keep claiming they can help you but clearly know even less about their product than you do. You didn’t hate this company before you bought their product, but you certainly do now.
Scenario 2:
We’ll use the same router example, but instead of calling the support number you leave a post on the company’s Facebook/Twitter. It doesn’t take long before you get an alert. Sweet! There’s a real person monitoring it that you can talk to. You check the response and find this:
“We’re so sorry you’re experiencing difficulty! Our support representatives would be happy to help you with that. The number is 1-800-HAH-HAHA.”
As irritation sets in, you wonder why they bother having someone monitor it if all they’re going to do is direct you somewhere else.
Scenario 3:
Same router. This isn’t you’re first rodeo. You’re not calling the number because you don’t have that kind of time and you know nobody on their social accounts is going to have anything useful to say. You send an email to their support department. You detail out your exact problem and everything you’ve tried to do up to this point to fix it.
Four to forty-eight hours later you receive a response. It’s full of sentences explaining how important your problem is, how very excited they are to help you, and the solution to your problem. …Only that solution is the first thing on your list of things you already tried. Did they even bother to read your email before they replied? If they were just going to fire off a useless response to get the ball out of their court, they could have at least done it sooner.
Delegating can mean better customer service
In my last post on social listening, I wrote that contact with your customers is not an entry-level responsibility. Those customer contacts you’re putting in the hands of minimum-wage, high turnover positions are KILLING your customer’s perception of your business. At every stage of my career I have heard business owners bemoaning not being able to find good customer service help when a customer contact goes wrong. While there are definitely bad employees out there, more often than not you’ve set them up for failure by delegating situations they lack both the skill-set and the experience to properly handle.
A customer with a problem is an opportunity
A customer with a problem is an opportunity to prove yourself. It is an opportunity to demonstrate the “The Customer is #1” slogans you keep peddling are legit. It is an opportunity to over-deliver and turn a customer with a problem into a customer for life. If your response to that opportunity is to send it to the lowest man on your totem pole, you’re not putting your money where your mouth is.
Unfortunately, most companies aren’t. Fortunately, that means it just got a little easier to stand out from the crowd.
I thought you guys were an email marketing agency? Why am I reading this blog post on EmailBroadcast.com?
We are a full-service email marketing agency with a staff made up of serious heavy hitters who have done big things in their careers. BIG things. But what we all have in common is an innate sense of marketing—we’re a passionate bunch!
What that means, along with never having to stress over an email campaign again, is that we’re constantly sharing ways to help you succeed. The bigger your business gets, the greater the opportunity to employ additional digital marketing tactics to help you increate the flow of prospective customers, build greater loyalty among existing customers, and increase your ROI. From cold email and SuperCollectors to generate leads, to automations messages (sent at exactly the right time) to welcome, nurture, and build loyalty, to monthly email campaigns to continuously talk to your audience, we do it all. Not to mention our SEO blog service to drive the traffic to your website initially, which is truly where it all begins.
If you find yourself nodding your head to any of the above, it may be time to give us a call or schedule a free 20-minute consultation. The first step is to get to know your business, and from there, we can identify areas of opportunity and growth. See? We’re already really excited to help.
