People are always striving to improve their customer service and for good reasons.
There are lots of good consequences to good customer service. The path we are talking about today is: as your customer service increases, your returns decrease, and your customers become an army of advocates. This creation of advocates has multiple trickle down effects.
There are a few companies that practice customer service to a point of near perfection. Before we dive into the specifics of each company, let’s take a look at the reaction individuals have to great service.
1) Loyal Following – When someone makes the choice to advocate on your behalf something spectacular happens in their psyche: They make a personal connection to you and your product or services. This personal connection is at the highest level of rapport. When someone chooses to speak on your behalf they are choosing to trust you.
2) We buy from validated companies – If I speak to someone I know and they recommend a company I am 80% more likely to go to that company. I know this is intuitive, but it is always important to mention. Great customer service builds advocates, when someone mentions your company they are validating your services or product.
3) Providing customer services starts with empowering your staff – the best and quickest way to boosting your customer service is to empower your employees and managers to take the steps need to provide exceptional service. Great service requires a certain amount of flexibility to handle problem solving.
In the next part we are going to look deep into the kaleidoscope of what makes Nordstrom tick (from the insider percpective of a 5 year employee), how Costco grew into a multi-billion dollar a year company, and what Apple did to turn it all around!
