What’s the best customer service experience that you have ever had?
I want you to take a couple of minutes and think about all the recent and/or not-so-recent customer service experiences you have had. Many of them are probably pretty “meh.” Nothing great, nothing outrageously terrible. But, what was that stand-out customer experience?
What made that experience so outstanding? Level of service provided? The awesome person helping you, after the sale care, etc?
Now, think about the worst experience you have had.
I’m willing to guess it was probably a whole lot easier to think of the customer service horror story. Now, I’m really not trying to say that we are all terrible, pessimistic people. It’s just the way our brains are wired.
It’s kind of the basis of metrics, like the Net Promoter Score. We really only share the most positive experiences and the most negative ones. The “Meh” experiences don’t really get talked about.
Think about it. When’s the last time you gave a restaurant a review after ordering at a restaurant, got your food in a reasonable period of time and everything tasted okay. It was decent, but nothing special. However, I am guessing you would be sharing this with all your friends if the waitress surprised you with free drinks or dessert. Or, the other side of the spectrum, the waitress completely ignored you and made you wait 2 hours for your food, which turned out to be bland and stone cold.
As a society (maybe, the smartphone helps with this), we are beginning to embrace and crave quality customer service again. You can’t go more than a few days without scrolling through the news and seeing stories about either incredibly awesome or awful customer service stories.
Think about it? It’s easier than ever for your customers to share these stories.
Did the flight attendant improv an epic version of the flight safety announcements? Post a video.
Found a dead rodent in your salad wrap? Tweet a photo.
The airline lost your expensive guitar? Post a music video about it.
The cable company wouldn’t let you cancel your account? Post an audio clip on Soundcloud.
And, the list goes on and on.
Consumers are more empowered than ever to define your brand. The point I’m getting at is that the brand doesn’t control it’s messaging. Their customers control that. The honest reality is it’s always been that way. It’s just that social media helped hammer that point home. No amount of marketing money can save a product that doesn’t care about their end customers.
Where the last three to four years were about acknowledging and learning how to use and build business cases around social media usage. I truly think the next three to five years will be about how customer service revolutionizes marketing and PR? After all, the best marketing comes from the awesome experiences that your customers are talking about, not from some ridiculously overpriced Superbowl commercial.
What are your thoughts? Do you think customer service is the new marketing?
