Customer Service is Your Most Important Task
A lot of companies treat their Customer Service departments as an afterthought. They see them a resource sink that’s regrettably necessary. I think that in 2010 this is a really messed-up view to take. Why do I believe this?
Let’s look at situation from the perspective of a small business. What is the best thing that you can do as an entrepreneur? Convince 1 person to be your fan for the rest of their life. You do this by overdelivering and being unbelievably awesome. You have to care about your customers, your audience.
This is why every time someone calls up the phone company’s customer support number, the CEO should be doing backflips. That’s the one moment that a company can actually demonstrate that they give a damn about their clients.
Let me give you an example of a big company that I think does this correctly – Apple. This one time we ordered a couple of iPods at work. One of them arrived fine, but the other was late. Tracking showed that it took a detour to the middle of nowhere. When the iPod arrived, the box was lighter than usual. We unpacked it to discover that the iPod was mysteriously missing. When I called Apple about it, they just sent out another iPod with no questions asked. I’m sure they followed up on the missing one with FedEx, but the whole process was smooth as butter.
That’s how you want to do it. It blows my mind that people spend a ton of cash on marketing, but then have a support department from hell. Customers aren’t idiots – you give them a hard time when they ask for help and they’ll remember it for the rest of their life; they’ll tell their friends about it too.
If you show that you really care about people and their life though, they’ll come back to you again and again. And that’s how you crush the competition.
Attack of the Paper Zombies
