The world is full of mysteries.
Why don’t more people find my jokes funny?
Why doesn’t Paul Simon have a Nobel Prize for Literature, like Bob Dylan?
Why can’t Alfa Romeo make slightly more reliable cars so I can post-rationalise buying one?
But one of the biggest mysteries for me is why, given its almost non-existent cost, more businesses don’t leverage the benefits of even pretty basic customer service.
The tragedy is that the bar for customer service is so low, you need to do very little to appear to be twice as good as everyone else.
It’s staggeringly simple, possibly the easiest and lowest-cost way to set yourself apart from the competition. Done well, great customer service will generate a stream of referrals – an astonishingly high proportion of which will turn into customers at pretty much zero cost, if you do it right.
Nowadays, people think “huge expense” when they think “customer service” but that’s only because enough people have been selling non-value adding CRM systems for long enough that people have learned by osmosis to think that looking after customers is expensive and doesn’t work very well.
By and large, that’s because they’ve been doing it wrong.
CRM systems can be helpful in large-scale customer interactions, but many businesses aren’t in that market. It’s amazing what you can do without one – or with a tiny amount of extra effort.
The coffee shop
There’s a coffee shop I visit semi-regularly…perhaps between two and four times a week.
There are about half a dozen core staff in there, who rotate on shift patterns to provide all-day cover seven days a week. And over the 18 months or so I’ve been visiting this coffee shop semi-regularly, the staff behind the counter have come to recognise me as a regular and know my order without me having to ask.
“Flat white, as usual?” the person on the till asks, with a friendly smile, when I get to the front of the line.
After I’ve confirmed that and paid, I have a quick chat with whoever is making the coffees that day about something relatively inconsequential (in the run-up to Christmas, the effort they all put into their Christmas jumper game was a particularly welcome source of material for our 6.30am chats).
All three of us wish one another a good day when the coffee’s ready, and I go on my way.
I’ve never timed these interactions, but this takes a minute or two at most from start to finish.
These people don’t know my name, what I do for a living, or even how funny my jokes are. Yet one of the reasons I keep coming back is because I feel welcome at this coffee shop just because they have taken fractions of a second, in their heads, to realise I come in regularly and always order the same thing.
The cost of doing this is precisely £0 – I’m not taking up any more time than they would be spending anyway taking my order or making my coffee, so this interaction is essentially free to the coffee shop chain. However, I now go there in preference to anywhere else because I’m made to feel welcome in that coffee shop.
Now, this coffee shop chain is not the one which irritatingly asks for your name for them to write on your cup in order to “make you feel more welcome”. The customer service in that chain is universally terrible, in my experience, so this is definitely a non-value-adding activity for them. It means taking an order takes longer, and impact of this process on how that chain makes their customers feel is somewhere between indifference and active loathing. (I’m in the latter camp.)
So, this other coffee shop chain who tries so hard to hit a KPI ends up doing worse than the people who don’t know my name.
Weird, huh?
Except it isn’t, if you remember the role of customer service is in how you make a customer feel, not how many boxes on your internal KPI scorecard you get to tick.
Either way, in my regular coffee shop – also part of a large, nationwide chain – they’ve locked in my regular visits (and, I’m sure, lots of other regular visitors too) by something as simple as recognising another human being and remembering the drink they order every time they come in.
Cost: £0.
Benefits: whatever they charge for 2-4 coffees a week, more or less for ever.
RoI: Off the scale.
(Side note: one of the major problems with customer service is that some people think they’re managing an internal process. Great customer service is how you help customers feel about your business. When you think it’s about managing internal processes, you end up spending £millions on IT solutions that don’t work very well, making customer service appear expensive and low value-adding. Working on how you help customers feel better about your business is almost free and the upsides are substantial, leading to the best RoI of just about anything you can do in your business.)
The hotel
If I’m staying over in London overnight for work, I generally stay in the same hotel. While I’m not there as often as I visit my local coffee shop, I’m there often enough that I recognise the staff on the check-in desk.
They have absolutely no idea who I am, though, and always ask “have you stayed with us before?” to save them launching into a detailed description of the restaurant opening hours and how to get in after the front door is locked at 11pm each night, which they keep for first-time visitors.
Sometimes, I’m asked that question twice in the same week by the same person.
Yet here’s the irony. The reservation system they use to book me in and hand across my room key knows I’ve stayed there before.
I know for sure it does, because the order confirmation I get when I book always says “thanks for choosing us again”. So their reservation system 100% knows I’m a returning guest.
Despite having this valuable information – much more information than they have in the coffee shop, for example – nobody in this hotel chain has thought of flagging the screen reception staff use to book guests in with the information that they have stayed at this hotel before.
It’s a tiny amount of code, not very difficult to do, and easy to get a screen pop when a name or reservation number is entered into the check-in system by the front-desk staff.
Yet, this hotel chain hasn’t put even the tiniest amount of effort into making returning guests feel welcome. And that pervades the attitudes of their staff who, despite being pleasant enough as individuals, don’t say to themselves “hang on, this is someone I see regularly”.
Actually, that’s not quite true. There is one person who does recognise me – I see him about one visit in 10 to this place, so not super-often.
But the first time he checked me in, he asked if I’d had a good day, in that formulaic way front-desk people sometimes do. He was genuinely shocked when I said I had, and then asked him how his day had gone. “Nobody ever asks us that” he responded, and thanked me for asking.
Now, every time he checks me in at this hotel, he greets me as a returning guest without having to input my reservation number and we have a quick chat of the sort I have with the people in the coffee shop, before he sends me off to my room feeling that I’ve been treated as fellow member of the human race, and not someone who was a glitch in the otherwise smooth running of the check-in desk.
Great customer service is free
There is a classic business book, “Quality Is Free” by Philip B. Crosby which I read back in the 1990s. He was something of a godfather of the Total Quality Management movement, for those of us old enough to remember that.
Anyway, Crosby’s fundamental thesis was that doing quality work isn’t a cost. At worst, it breaks even but, more often than not, improving quality adds to your bottom line when thoughtless cost-cutting and corner-cutting would (contrary to popular belief) damage it.
All my experience of business is that this is absolutely true. Getting something right up-front generally costs about 10% of what it costs to put something right after it’s gone horribly wrong.
So it is with customer service.
Great customer service can be literally free to deliver (eg in the coffee shop) or it can cost fractions of pennies per transaction (eg writing the code for a screen-pop for returning customers on the check-in system).
However the RoI is generally significant. If all you can do is get one extra cup of coffee a week from someone, against a base cost of £zero, that’s a phenomenal RoI. Do that often enough and your coffee shop will be vastly more profitable than anyone else’s, no matter how hard they try gimmicks like asking you for your name.
Break the link in your mind with customer service requiring £million IT solutions.
In huge organisations that might be an essential part of how you run your business. But in most organisations, you can do easy, simple things for either no cost at all, or for fractions of a penny per transaction.
Factor in even a tiny blip in your revenues – just one extra cup of coffee a week, for example – and spending time thinking about how you can make your customers feel more positive towards your business will be one of the highest RoI activities you are ever likely to carry out.
That’s not a bad outcome for something as simple as learning how to greet your customers with a warm “hello again!”