The Opportunity
The days of the corner store seem to have been replaced by mega-malls and “virtual” shopping experiences. Smaller enterprises simply can’t compete with the buying power, hours of operation, and low overhead of the larger or higher-tech institutions. Yet many customers balk at the impersonal nature of these transactions. Customers now have many choices of a venue to purchase a particular product or service. The reason they choose yours is likely to be flawless customer service, which encompasses convenience, trust, and concern for the customer.
Bill Gates, the guru of the computer age, has indicated that the most successful enterprises of the future will be those with the right blend of high-tech with high-touch.
The Solution
Sounds like a paradox, this combination of high-tech with high-touch. It isn’t, however as long as you keep customer service at the center of you business mission. Technology for its own sake generally turns customers off. Unless you are marketing computer games to a specific audience, you don’t need or want ridiculously complicated technological sales features. Whether you are an online business, a physical place of business, or both, the same age-old principles of customer service apply.
Know your Customer- In General
The more you know about your customer’s demographics, buying habits, and needs, the better you can meet those needs.
Really good restaurants make an art of unobtrusively evaluating the needs of customers, and catering to those needs. An efficient business lunch on a strict time schedule might be going on at one table, while a romantic interlude may be happening at another. A skillful waiter can fill the role expected of him at each table, simply by observing the behavior of his customers and adapting accordingly. By observing the average times of stays, the times that certain types of customers visit, and menu items they select, restaurant management can arrange staffing, lighting, menu choices, and timing in order to accommodate the needs of their most frequent customers, while maintaining that flexibility.
In an online business, you may want to have more than one way of getting to the same information, product or service. Have a gallery or browsing section for those who want to casually explore, and a search engine for those who want to dive in, get what they need, and get out quickly. A well-designed site can accommodate the needs of many types of customers; in this case, the experience is driven by the customer, rather than by a waiter. By observing site statistics, a site manager can spend more time and resources on features used most often or by the most profitable profile of a visitor.
Know Your Customer- In Specific
My son’s orthodontist has an unbelievable memory. He sees somewhere on the order of a hundred kids every couple of weeks, and he always remembers names without hesitation. He also remembers merit badges in scouts, grades on math tests, and weird stories about their pets.
He greets each client by name and chats with them fluently about themselves. Kids, and parents, eat this up. This kind of attention does a number of things:
- It establishes his credibility. Parents are much more comfortable knowing their children in the hands of a someone who knows them well, which in a parents’ mind translates to an assumption that he remembers the details of their treatment equally well.
- It builds relationships with the young clients, who are more likely to follow the instructions of someone they like and trust.
- It builds relationships with the parents, who feel good about the care their children are receiving (parents are footing the bill, after all!)
He also remembers younger brothers and sisters who often accompany his patients on appointments. Not only does this make the whole family feel special and cared for, it also establishes a positive relationship with potential future clients.
I suspect that he takes a few minutes to jot down the gist of conversations in each patient’s file after each visit and then reviews the file before his young patients arrive.
Other businesses can take advantage of this tactic in a number of ways:
Many people in customer service positions use a database or cardfile on their clients. Besides the “vital statistics,” they also record hobbies, spouses’ names, birthdates, and topics of conversation. This gives them a head start on any meeting and helps maintain a number of relationships without relying too heavily on memory.
Web sites can use “customizable” interfaces. Visitors can design their own pages on Yahoo or AOL that show their preferred views of selected information. This creates acknowledges the visitor’s personality and preferences, and “recognizes” them when they log in.
A Word of Caution:
The July 1999 issue of Yahoo magazine reported that there is a means for Internet merchants to share sophisticated profiles of customers. Called a “click report,” this information is used by sites such as brokerage firms to prioritize requests on busy trading days- allowing the “best” customers the best performance times while less desireable customers wait.
Use of such a report may be useful in some instances, but snubbing any customer for any reason can bite you. Customers that received shoddy treatment may be the victim of “mistaken identity” or an erroneous report. Appropriately judged or not, they will probably also relate their experiences to others.
Our advice- If you are at risk of giving customers substandard service for any reason, you are probably throwing money away and possibly jeopardizing your reputation as well. Make whatever improvements are necessary to accommodate them. In a physical business, this could involve moving to a larger location or adding more checkouts. In a virtual location, it may mean adding bandwidth capacity or mirror sites.
Greet Customers Warmly
Most retail outfits make it a practice to greet customers promptly when they enter. Even if sales staff are tied up with other customers and won’t be getting back for awhile, and even if the customer wants to browse for awhile before interacting with the sales staff, it sets the stage. It indicates- we are here for you and we appreciate your business.
The principle of first impressions is very strong in the virtual world. Where traditional customers would have to get back in their car and drive across town to another store if they’re not immediately impressed, virtual shoppers can click away in seconds. The odds are stacked against you unless you provide, or at least promise, answers and solutions within seconds.
This can be done on a website by providing a front page that loads quickly and reassures customers- “You are in the right place, we appreciate your business and can help you with what you came here for.” If your front page has th slightest delay in loaded, you may want to redesign for speed, or put an “interim” image or text in place so visitors have something to look at and feel like their presence has been acknowledged while the rest of the page loads.
Be Available, but Don’t Hover
Many good restaurants employ a sommelier, whose responsibilities include maintaining the wine cellar, monitoring inventory of spirits, training the waitstaff, planning promotions and evnets, and working the floor.
Peter Granoff of Virtual Vinyards describes his experiences as the sommelier at Square One, an exclusive San Francisco restaurant.
In the evenings, I was always on hand to recommend a bottle of wine to customers who wanted it. With six to eight waiters and only one sommelier, I couldn’t hit every table. The waitstaff was trained, however, to know when to suggest that I visit one of our guests.
If our customers knew exactly what they wanted, then the waiter would bring it; I wasn’t involved. If the customer, however, had some trepidation about ordering wine, or wanted to try something new, their waiter whould signal me and I would stop by the table.
Each table was different. I needed to size up the customer before helping them select a wine. If a customer had a business dinner in progress, I would be in and out quickly, and ask how we might make their evening more productive. If, on the other hand, we had a couple in for a romantic dinner, I might linger a bit to give them the story behind a vineyad or answer their questions about a bottle.
Next, if the customer wanted some guidance, I talked with them about what they usually enjoyed, what food they were having, and make a suggestion or two. Having a sommelier on staff allowed us to offer wines that other restaurants could not, because they needed to be “hand sold.”
Granoff goes on in the article to describe how he applies these principles of applying different marketing methods to different types of shoppers to online distribution of wine on the extremely successful website, Virtual Vinyards. (See Resources.)
Neat, simple, quickly downloadable graphics combined with flowering descriptions of each wine and photographs of vinyards, and custom-designed tasting charts with ratings of each wine provide a rich array of information available to customers who have the time and desire to learn more. Customers who know what they want can use a quick search mechanism and get in an out quickly.
Conclusion
Many virtual businesses have forgotten (or perhaps never learned in the first place) that customer service is a universal principle of good business. Customers are still people, whether you’re face-to-face with them in a physical store or mouse-to-database with them in a virtual one. They are there because they need or want something, and if the technical gizmos aren’t centered around the basic principles of customer service, you’ve wasted a lot of money and server space. Used properly, however, technology offers opportunities for customer service that a traditional store could never supply. The doors are always open, the search engines find things faster than rummaging through a dusty back room, and there is the potential for rich layers of information that the customer can browse at will. It’s all a matter of how high a priority you set on customer service and how well you apply the technology to these principles.
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