The office supply supermarket Staples introduced the Easy Button to their marketing campaigns with great effectiveness. The message being, Staples makes buying easy. A simple and easy message. In recent days I’ve been pondering the Easy Button, especially as relates to customer service. Partly because so many companies are suffering from it and so many customers are talking about it. For instance, I continue to have a problem with mail delivery service. It appears that my local post office is having great difficulty in telling the difference between Quant and Quehl (my street name). I know the difference may be small, and it may be confusing, however the impact is huge. In fact just yesterday I received a piece of mail that went to the wrong address, so the receiver of my mail posted on the envelope, “This is so sad, I have been to the post office 5X. Please look closer when delivering your mail, ‘Do your job right.’”
This morning I was reading Jeff Jarvis’s BuzzMachine blog, and he was discussing the terrible service over at CableVision. Jarvis states,
I returned after three days away to find our internet not working. I called Cablevision and after a few obvious steps, I’m told they can’t see the modem and they offer to send someone out … in three days… Oh, just got email from someone at Cablevision who saw the discussion 12 hours ago. He works in media relations. Hint to all companies: Now that we’re all in media, everybody in a company is in media relations.
And recently, I saw this over at Futureblog, The Invaluable Stories Inside Customer-service Calls.
Much of the story work I’m familiar with involves asking people to tell stories about their experiences on a particular topic. I do some of this myself. But I’ve also done work with a completely different class of story. This story is created out of the spontaneous meeting of two people - a customer and a customer-service rep - over the telephone.
A customer-service call is less an anecdote than it is like a play unfurling in real time. There’s nothing but dialogue, yet there’s conflict, emotion, suspense (will she get the credit she’s demanding for the series of dropped calls? Or will she have to escalate to the supervisor?). Listening to these recordings gives you an intimate view into the relationship customers have with their products and with their service providers.
And within these calls there are almost always sub-stories–the sequence of events that led to the person calling in the first place. There are also moments of human connection… and of estrangement.
The difference between good customer service and mediocre customer service is night and day. Most companies profess the goal of happy customers. They use monikers like, “Our goal is to exceed our customer’s expectations.” Yet in today’s world, many companies fail miserably at the customer service game. And along the way, brands are being damaged and companies are being destroyed from the inside out.
Bottom Line: Companies need customers more than ever. Customers need their supplier companies less than ever. The world is growing increasingly connected and vocal. Solution: Provide you customers an “Easy Button” that delivers results!
Tags: cablevision, customer service, easy button
