Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: Delight Your Customers

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...I know I’ve written about this topic before, but since great customer service is a particular passion of mine, I promise that I will keep writing about it...deal with it. If you feel you are delivering perfect customer service and don’t need to hear any more about it, go read something about how to find new customers when you lose the old ones because you’re going to need to know that pretty soon.

For the rest of you, those like me who love great customer service and aspire to learn as much as you can about it, read on.

One of the reasons I’m re-energized about customer service is that I’ve been reading this great new book called Delight Your Customers by Steve Curtin. The author talks about great customer service, how important it is, and how to deliver it. You really should pick it up.

One chapter I found particularly interesting focuses on delivering service heroics. In this chapter, Curtin defines two kinds of service heroics: “No fault heroics” and “At fault heroics.” In our business we need a little bit--nay, strike that--we need a lot of both.

Obviously, “no fault heroics" applies to those times when great service is delivered for no good reason except that this is what the company does. I think of a friend of mine, a PCB shop sales manager, who got in touch with me the other day to see if I had any ideas as to who could build boards for one of his customers as the technology of these boards was beyond his company’s capabilities. I checked around for a while and referred him to another one of my clients who could build what his customer needed.

He called this company and they are working together to supply the customer with what he needs. My friend did not have to do this; he could have just “no bid” the job and said,  “Good luck with that.” He could have done nothing else and everything would have been okay. But he decided to go out on a limb and go the extra mile for his customer. He had a customer, and that customer had a problem, and he solved it. Now he has made a great impression on that customer and that customer will be grateful and will make sure that my friend gets to build more of his products. Not only that, but he has made a new friend of the other board shop and in this business we need all the friends we can get. My friend participated in “no fault heroic” customer service. Good for him; we need more of that.

Now, “at fault customer service heroics” is something we get a chance to provide more often than we’d like. We perform heroic customer service when something goes wrong, when we mess something up and we have to recover somehow. I am a strong believer in the idea that great customer-supplier relationships are forged in adversity. Often it’s not the problem, but how we solve the problem that determines what we're made of. Solving a problem that we created is a great way to show our customers what we are made of.

Solving a problem that the customer himself created is truly an example of “at fault customer services heroics.” I have another client, a very good board shop, that has built its reputation on solving customer problems--problems that, for the most part, their customers created.

Here is how they do it. They have an excellent front-end department made up of great CAM people always on the lookout for issues in their customers’ data. Even though they are primarily a quick-turn company and they basically sell speed, they will always check customer data very carefully. They notify the customer if something can improved for more efficient productivity or, better yet, if a critical error should be fixed.

Many times the customer that feels he is buying speed will initially chastise this company for calling them and holding up the boards. Sometimes they point out that other vendors just shut up and build their boards with the data "as is." Why would my client hold things up? In the end (and it happens every time), my client will be notified and thanked by customers that come to realize he saved their proverbial  bacon. This happens so often that my client's literature and advertising is full of testimonials written voluntarily and sent in by customers who never fail to mention how grateful they are that someone found and solved their problem. That is great “at fault customer service heroics.”

Think about this for a while today; think about your company and ways that you can deliver great customer service heroics. It will really come back at you ten-fold, I promise. It’s only common sense.